


Like Blood From A Stone

by vaguenotion



Series: Blood Makes The Knife Holy [1]
Category: Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure (Cartoon)
Genre: Andrew is a huge piece of shit, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Varian is a precious reformed human flower crown, Varian whump, no beta reading we die like mne
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-02-22 15:20:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 37,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22565464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaguenotion/pseuds/vaguenotion
Summary: The Separatists of Saporia have a new benefactor, and that benefactor needs Corona's alchemist. They're more than happy to retrieve him.
Relationships: Cassandra & Varian (Disney: Tangled), Friendship (arguably), Platonic Relationships - Relationship
Series: Blood Makes The Knife Holy [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1677211
Comments: 271
Kudos: 970





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway I have to suffer a long-ass train commute every morning and I need to do something besides playing Stardew Valley the whole time. So, train fic! Fic written on a train. On my phone. Quality be damned.

“So the viscosity will help to slow the settling, which will in turn help prevent separation, meaning it will last longer into the winter, so we can enjoy it at Christmas! It’s like a preserve, but heating it up will speed the molecules and allow it to become more fluid and less sludgy, and then it’ll be like…. A hot fruit drink? Like cider. The point is, we can extend the shelf-life of this juice to allow consumption for _way_ longer!”

Varian’s voice had risen in both volume and excitement as he explained himself, the thrill of a successful experiment ratcheting up his nerves. He would have to wait until the dead of winter to get true confirmation of his hypothesis, but Ruddiger didn’t need to know that. As they walked through the back streets of Corona, his backpack heavy with the supplies he’d purchased for the final tests, Varian carried on about the undiscovered joy of strawberry juice in winter. Ruddigar padded along beside him, happily exploring the smells of the city. 

It was mid-morning. If they didn’t dawdle, they could make it back to Old Corona by sundown. He might even be able to get some work in before exhaustion won out.

Varian was in the midst of explaining the inspiration for his chemistry experiment when Ruddigar suddenly chirped and turned abruptly into an alleyway. It took Varian several steps to realize he’d lost his companion.

“Ruddigar? What’s up, buddy?” The alchemist pivoted and leaned into the alleyway to see what the raccoon had been distracted by, just in time to see Ruddigar’s tail vanish around another corner. 

After a beat of hesitation, curiosity won out over concern for getting home early, and he pursued. He’d lost Ruddigar in these twisting streets before, and knew if he let him wander too far, he’d spend too much time trying to find him again. 

“Ruddigar, come on,” Varian implored, “I don’t want to stay another night. What could possibly be so—“

Varian rounded the corner to find two things that stopped him short. The first was Ruddigar, eyes wide with delight as he gazed upon an entire roasted chicken that he’d smelled from the street. The second was a large, shadowed stranger holding up a burlap sack, about to lunge for the unsuspecting raccoon.

“Ruddigar!” Varian surged forward with one hand outstretched, more from instinct than plan, but just as the word left his throat, the sack closed around his companion and closed tight. Ruddigar squeaked in surprise, scooped up by the hulking stranger and thrown easily over his shoulder. “Hey,” Varian shouted, “what are you doing? Let him go!”

Varian surged forward a few more paces before stopping short, finally registering the stranger’s size and bulk. The man turned toward him, unbothered by the squirming sack on his back, and grinned. 

Something shuttered to a halt in Varian’s mind. He knew this man, but had compartmentalized, had isolated his experience in prison so thoroughly that it took him a moment to really process who he was seeing. In that time, a second figure stepped out of the shadows, small and portly, grinning like she could barely contain her excitement.

Varian took a step back, his mind going unhelpfully blank with dawning fear, when a voice from behind made him jump.

“Well, if it isn’t my old cellmate.”

He knew who it was before he turned, his mind skipping through several shades of denial and disbelief in the space of a second. 

Behind him, blocking his only way out of the alleyway, stood Andrew. The man was leaning casually against one wall, arms crossed over his chest. The self-satisfied grin on his face sent a rush of pins and needles across Varian’s upper back. 

Andrew’s grin was easy. Confident. “We have some catching up to do, Varian.”

-

Max was doing his third daily round through the commerce district, vigilant for theft of any variety. With the captain of the guard only recently returned from his long stint away, things had yet to go back to normal around the city, and so Max was more than happy to pick up any slack there may still be. He was, after all, the most accomplished member of the city guard. 

There were more people out than usual that day, the first truly warm day of spring drawing everyone from their homes like flowers turning to face sunlight. Most of them parted for Max if they saw him coming, and no one stood out as suspicious. 

In fact, there were more children than usual, out to play in the fresh air, which meant Max had to be more cautious about where he stepped. He was, after all, an impressive seventeen hands high, and smaller children didn’t have any concern about running between his legs, no matter what their parents called after them. 

And yet, somehow, over the peels of laughter and shouting coming from every angle, Max’s ear still flicked at a faint, familiar sound. An instinct more than anything, an alertness surged forward to the front of his focus. Something was wrong. He’d just heard… _something_. Unclear what it was, but worthy of investigation. His instincts were never wrong. 

Nose to the ground, Max began to search for something--anything--that would lend credence to his suspicion. As he searched, he kept his ears up, straining to hear the sound again, but there was nothing unique over the cacophony of city sounds. 

_There_. A familiar smell, unique to a certain raccoon who Max had competed with multiple times for apples over the last two years. He followed the smell, faint though it was, passed a shop that sold glassware, passed a bakery known for its jams and jellies, and into a cobblestone side street that wound between old stucco buildings and out of site. 

Here, Max lifted his head and huffed in determined concern. Something was certainly wrong, if the tone of the sound he’d heard was anything to go by. Squaring his broad shoulders, Max began down the alleyway, straining to see around each bend as he came upon them.

It was only a few yards in that he heard the sound again, this time clear and unmistakable:

A shout of pain.

-

Varian hit the uneven ground hard, just barely getting his hands out in front of him in time to save his head from smacking the stones. With the air flattened from his lungs, he struggled to roll onto his side in an attempt at seeing the next blow. 

It didn’t fall. He was surrounded by three familiar Saporians, all leering down at him with an unmistakable kind of joy. This was cathartic for them--after he turned his back on them to help Rapunzel and Corona, their plot had failed. They’d been waiting for this.

“Normally, traitors to Saporia pay with their lives,” Clementine said, an eerie echo of what Andrew had snarled while holding Varian over the side of their airship. It felt like ages since that had happened, but where Varian had been on adventures and returned to normal life since then, they’d been left in the dungeons, stewing in the anger of their failed coup. And Varian knew all about stewing in anger. 

“However,” Andrew continued, pressing the heel of his boot against Varian’s upper arm to pin him on his side, “we have a new benefactor that wants you alive. Lucky for you, huh, _buddy?_ ”

He emphasized the last word by leaning his weight hard onto Varian, drawing a groan from the young alchemist. Varian squirmed, trying to get out from under his boot, but Andrew only laughed. “Of course,” the man continued, “Zhan Tiri didn’t say anything about needing you to be unhurt. And we’ve got some frustration to vent after your little betrayal back at the castle.”

“Zhan Tiri,” Varian repeated, his voice small and tight. From the story of Demanitus? He was a boogeyman who parents warned children about to ensure they behave, wasn’t he? But Demanitus’s chamber was all too real, far below their feet and in ruins after Cassandra had made her last appearance in Corona’s capital. And if that existed, along with the magic of the sundrop and moon stone, who was to say that the evil entity from that story wasn’t real as well?

But he had no time to think about it. Andrew’s boot vanished from his shoulder, returning again only a moment later in the form of a sharp kick to his ribs. Varian gagged, curling inward to try and protect himself. He vaguely heard Andrew say _get him up,_ and Clementine say _he doesn’t need working ankles to do alchemy, does he_?, but he was having a hard time drawing a breath, and his ears rang from the effort. A huge hand grabbed his upper arm and yanked him to his feet, holding him there.

“It’s a shame he needs his hands,” Andrew said, leaning far too close and making Varian flinch away. “I wanted to break his little fingers into splinters.”

“Listen,” Varian tried, his words stumbling out of his mouth like they’d been crowded in there, “I know you’re angry, but taking it out on me isn’t going to help anything. You don’t have to do this.”

“Ah,” Andrew replied, standing up to his full height, “you see buddy, we do. For Saporia to rise back to glory, we need Corona to fall, and Zhan Tiri is going to make that happen. And if he needs you for that, then we can make peace with not getting the revenge we wanted.”

“If he’s the monster the stories say he is, then he won’t give you Saporia,” Varian insisted. “He won’t give you _anything._ ”

The back of Andrew’s hand struck hard against Varian’s face, his rings breaking skin and drawing blood. Before Varian could recover his equilibrium, Andrew closed his hand around his face and jerked his head back around. “We’ll see who comes out on top, won’t we, Varian? Just because your wretched little princess let you down doesn’t mean we’ll make the same mistake.”

A flare of anger burned through the panic in his gut. It was fueled by old shame and new protectiveness. Rapunzel and he had their rough past, but she had given him another chance. She had kept her word and freed his father, had supported and encouraged him ever since. That, and perhaps a bit of self-preservation, was all it took for Varian to shift and sink his teeth into the side of Andrew’s hand. 

The man shouted in surprise and pain, withdrawing his hand as fast as he was able. Varian spit at his feet, pulling to break free of the large hands that held him up, but they held him fast. 

“You little--” Andrew started, his face twisting with a flash of anger. Before he could form the thought, a noise from the mouth of the alleyway interrupted.

Standing aggressively only a few yards behind Andrew, Max lifted his head high and belted out a loud and aggressive neigh. Relief flooded Varian like a storm surge. Andrew’s face fell, before the man grit his teeth and changed gears. 

“Get him out of here,” he instructed. Kai, the large man who had been holding Varian in place, grumbled and hoisted the teen up, throwing him over his shoulder like he weighed nothing. 

“Max,” Varian shouted, panic tightening his voice. He struggled, kicking his legs uselessly while trying to push up against the hand that pinned him to Kai’s shoulder. Somewhere to his left, Clementine pulled a vial from her cloak and reared back to throw it. Whatever it was, Varian was certain it was one of the chemical compositions he had taught her in prison. 

“Look out,” he cried, trying to warn Max, but the horse had already charged toward them. When the thrown vial smashed in front of him, it was too late.

A pink cloud erupted, startling Max to a rough stop. When it cleared, that unmistakable pink goo was surrounding his front hooves, trapping him in place. He cried out, loud and angry, as Andrew laughed. 

“Thanks for the formula, kid,” Clementine sneered, watching as Varian continued to struggle. 

“No, Max!” Desperation fueled renewed struggling, but Kai held Varian over his shoulder as if he were lying still. “Help!”

The Saporians were moving now, in the opposite direction of where Max was struggling against the pink goo. It was difficult to breath with a shoulder jostling hard against his stomach, and Varian braced his hands against Kai’s upper back for some support. “Max,” he called again, adrenaline pounding through his veins. 

It was one thing to wake up with his hands tied behind his back, to find Cassandra observing him. For all her betrayal and recent villainy, Cassandra had been a friend. She hadn’t wanted to hurt him. 

As Max fell further and further away, and the alleyway began to curve around the back of a building, fear began to overwhelm him. Real, cold fear, coupled with the realization that he wasn’t about to be saved. He could hear Max crying out, frustrated and desperate, but the sounds were getting further away--he was still trapped in the goo. With effort, Varian twisted and looked over his shoulder in the direction they were headed, and a new spike of fear pierced into his gut.

An air balloon was waiting in a small, empty plaza. 

It was too late.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the comments and kudos! I haven't contributed to an active fandom in a long time, so it's really novel and nice to get a response. 
> 
> Steady pacing? Consistent writing voice? Not in my train fic

Realistically, Rapunzel had only been an acting authority in Corona for a little over two years. And if she was being totally honest, she had spent one of those years abroad seeking the moon stone, so it was hard to count that as time spent being a proper princess. Despite this, she felt as though she had become familiar with the ebb and flow of drama around the kingdom. She had survived enough of it, after all, and there are patterns to be found in everything. Certain times of the year saw more neighbor quarrels than others, and she could set her watch by how regularly the bakers decided they’d had enough of each other.

So it wasn’t a complete surprise when a guard appeared out of the crowd in the market square, out of breath and struggling to gain her attention.

She had just been to a small import shop with Eugene, where she had bought herself some pink rock salt from Neserdnia. She could have sent someone else to fetch it for her—probably should have, given her title—but any excuse to stroll with Eugene was a welcome one, and besides, it still felt strange to ask other people to do her work for her. 

Rapunzel turned to face the guard as he stumbled to a stop a few feet shy of where she and Eugene stood. The man bowed his head in a show of respect, but was also struggling to breathe, so it was an awkward thing to see.

“What is it, Phil,” Rapunzel asked, not unkindly. She knew before he answered that it wasn’t good news, but she always held out the hope that maybe it was something silly. Silly was always preferable to dramatic.

“Your Majesty, you must come at once. Trouble in an alleyway a few streets over.”

Whether he was being vague so that civilians were not made aware of what was going on, or because he himself wasn’t sure, Rapunzel couldn’t tell. She just nodded, glancing at Eugene to communicate…. something.  _ I’m going. Are you coming? You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. _

Eugene, of course, sighed and shrugged, before following after her. He always followed. She loved him for it.

The guard led them through the crowd swiftly, despite his already being out of breath. They passed a bakery and glassmakers shop before turning into a side street. Rapunzel followed on swift feet, trying not to get too ahead of herself. With the list of her enemies growing steadily each day, and Cassandra having already attacked the kingdom once, Rapunzel was prone to jumping to worst-case scenarios. 

And yet, when she rounded the corner into the alleyway where a few guards stood, she still needed a moment to wrap her head around what she found.

There was Max, neighing angrily, with both front hooves trapped in pink goo. Further into the alleyway, one of the guards was holding a burlap sack that squirmed and chirped irritably. 

“What’s going on,” she asked, directing the question to Max rather than anyone else. She entered the alleyway, reaching into her bag as she went to retrieve the salt she had purchased just that morning.

“I heard Maximus from the street and found him like this. I don’t know what’s going on, though,” offered the guard who was holding the writhing sack. 

“Isn’t that one of Varian’s formulas? Should we be worried,” another guard inquired, an edge of panic in his voice. Rapunzel cracked the jar of salt and bent to sprinkle it on the pink goo, which began to hiss and retreat from around Max’s hooves.

“I don’t know how many times you guys need this explained to you, but Varian isn’t a threat anymore,” Eugene replied, a mix of exhaustion and annoyance in his tone.

“He isn’t,” Rapunzel agreed. “Max, what happened?”

She stepped back while Max pulled his powerful legs from the goo, free at last. He was clearly agitated, and stepped away from the goo to huff powerfully at the guard holding the sack. The guard in question looked panicked; Rapunzel nodded and took the sack right out of his hands.

When she opened it, a familiar ball of grey fur sprang out at her. 

“Woah,” she belted, dodging in the knick of time. Ruddigar sailed passed her, hissing, and landed not far from Eugene. The raccoon looked around desperately, trying to get his bearings, braced for a fight. As he recognized Rapunzel and Eugene, his hackles lowered and he transitioned almost seamlessly from aggression to panic.

“Ruddigar?” Rapunzel looked back to Max, who neighed impatiently and pointed his nose toward something behind her.

When Rapunzel turned and found what he was pointing at, a chill frosted the inside of her chest. 

Varian’s goggles lay broken on the cobblestone, lenses smashed and frame crunched.

Rapunzel turned back around to face Max, the flash of panic joined by resolve. “What happened?”

The thoroughbred was already moving, stomping and scraping his hoof into a patch of dirt between two loose stones. Rapunzel stepped forward, frowning at the crude drawing until she could identify what it was.

“That’s the Saporian Separatists crest,” she voiced, her words tense.

“But they’re all in jail,” Eugene reasoned. He had crouched to pick up Varian’s goggles, his brow twisted with worry. “They  _ are _ in jail, right?”

The surrounding guards nodded, glanced at each other, and nodded again. Max whinnied and scrapped a horseshoe against the stone three times.

“Three… There were three of them,” Rapunzel repeated, watching Max nod. “And they took him?”

When the horse cried out in confirmation, Rapunzel set her jaw and squared her shoulders. She would have to put her fear and panic aside—it wasn’t going to help resolve this. She felt Eugene place his hand on her shoulder, but she turned instead toward the guards.

“Confirm who is and is not in the dungeon,” she ordered. “Max, do you have any idea where they took him?”

She was answered by Max lowering his nose to the street and taking off after a scent, presumably in the direction the Saporians had fled. Rapunzel followed, her mind racing. Could this be Cassandra, again? But she had no love for Andrew, and despite all of the surprises Cassandra had shown her, Rapunzel had a hard time picturing Cas siding with him for any reason. Was it just revenge? The Saporians resented Varian after he changed sides, but kidnapping him didn’t seem to match up with their whole “traitors die” narrative.

She stopped short when Max came to an abrupt halt beside a small, cracked fountain. They were standing in the middle of an old plaza, cramped between buildings and unused by the crowds of Corona for who knows how long. A rope lay along the old cobblestones, tethered on one end to a portion of the fountain. It had been cut. Lingering in the unmoving air between the tall buildings that surrounded the plaza was the faint smell of burners, a smell that Rapunzel knew from her time spent in air balloons.

She lifted her eyes skyward. They got away. 

Max looked especially distressed. Rapunzel supposed she couldn’t blame him; he had clearly interrupted the kidnapping, and if not for that goo, he probably would have been able to save Varian from the Saporians. 

“Don’t worry, Max,” she said, placing her hand on his broad shoulder. “We’re going to get him back.”

-

As it turns out, it’s pretty easy to pretend to be unconscious. 

Varian had been lying on his side up against the wicker wall of the basket for some time now, eyes closed, unmoving. His hands had been bound behind his back with coarse rope, and when that didn’t stop him from struggling and kicking at his captors, Andrew had shoved him up against the side of the basket as the balloon lifted further and further from help. 

_ “I forgot how irritating you are _ ,” he had sneered, before the heel of his boot came down against Varian’s forehead.

Even if it had rendered him unconscious at the time of the kick, he came back around after only about thirty seconds. Any longer and the damage would’ve been far too severe. Rather than try to get up, though, Varian had laid there with his eyes closed and his head throbbing. It only took him a few moments to determine he was better off staying still and letting them believe he was out of it.

“Who cares,” Andrew was saying, in response to something Varian hadn’t quite made out with the ringing in his ears. “Let them. Where we’re going, Rapunzel and her sundrop powers won’t be any threat.”

“Maybe so, but the boy nearly destroyed Corona on his own once. We shouldn’t underestimate what he can do, even without his friends.” Clementine’s voice had an odd quality to it, and if he didn’t know that they wanted him dead, Varian might have mistaken it for respect. 

“Aw, this little thing?” Kai sounded decidedly less concerned. Varian felt the toe of a boot nudge his shoulder; he tried not to wince too noticeably at the way it rocked his aching ribs. “He’s harmless without his chemistry set. Didn’t even put up a fight back there.”

“Speak for yourself,” Andrew replied darkly. For the smallest moment, Varian could remember the feeling of his teeth popping through the skin of Andrew’s hand, and he had to fight not to grin. Sobering was the knowledge that Andrew could pay him back for the injury at any time. 

“He  _ has _ been out of it for a while,” Clementine observed. “We should probably make sure he's not dead. The demon won’t be happy if we show up with a corpse.”

Varian tensed, hopefully imperceptibly. The basket swayed as someone moved toward him, reinforced wicker creaking underfoot. He sensed rather than saw a large form moving into his personal space, and couldn’t help but flinch when two work-hardened fingers pressed against the side of his neck, just under his jaw. 

“Pulse seems pretty fast,” Kai observed, his voice far too close to Varian’s ear. “Wake up, kid.”

A large hand roughly patted Varian’s cheek, and he turned his face away on instinct, groaning.

“There, he’s alive,” Kai confirmed uselessly.

“Wake up, kid,” Andrew cut in, his tone cruel and satisfied. “We’re almost home.”

Varian felt someone kick his shin, and he curled his legs inward in an aborted attempt at protecting himself. Defeated, he opened his eyes and looked up at the three adults towering over him.

“You got a little something right there,” Andrew said, tapping a finger to his cheek in roughly the same spot where his ring had drawn blood on Varian’s face when he’d struck him. He laughed, amused at his own joke, and Clementine and Kai joined in easily.

Varian grit his teeth. “Oh,” he replied curtly, “you mean where that wrinkle is on your face? Age is rough, huh?”

It felt good. Really, it did, at least for the initial second following the comment where Andrew’s expression tightened and Clementine and Kai laughed harder. The satisfaction was short lived.

Andrew’s hand—the one that wasn’t wrapped in bandages—snagged a fistful of Varian’s hair and pulled, yanking the teenager clear up onto his knees with a hiss of pain. Once there, Andrew hauled Varian up by his upper arm and shoved him chest-first against the side of the basket. Below, a sheer plunge to certain death stared back at him.

Andrew’s chest pressed against Varian’s upper back, pinning his sore ribs against the rail. Squirming at the unwelcome close contact, Varian closed his hands into fists and tried to use his core strength to push back. Nothing came of it. 

With one fist still gripping Varian’s hair, Andrew leaned in and spoke just beside his ear, making the alchemist flinch.

“Zhan Tiri told us you translated a dead language, and destroyed the cipher. You might be the only key to translating all those old scrolls, but once Zhan Tiri has all he wants from you? I’m going to drop you from this balloon and watch you splat to  _ pieces _ on the ruins of Corona.”

“Third time’s the charm, huh?” Varian replied, sarcasm audible through his clenched teeth. 

“Enjoy that attitude while you can, Varian,” Andrew replied, his smile audible in his tone. “I doubt you’ll be able to keep up the false confidence for very long.”

As he spoke, the balloon crested a tall series of hills, and revealed a large valley backed by tall, jagged mountains. Before them, the ruins of a great tree stretched out in all directions. All around it’s base, craggy rocks and scorched earth stretched out for hundreds of yards, as if nature itself dared not get too close to it. 

From the heart of the ruined trunk, an unmistakable glow was emanating softly, a sickening, eerie green. 

“What  _ is _ that,” Varian breathed, too startled by the unsettling scene to stop himself. Andrew let go of his hair, but kept him pinned against the side of the basket. His now-free hand reached around and gripped Varian’s jaw, ensuring that he didn’t look away from the tree. 

“Oh, I figured you’d recognize it right away,” Andrew replied, his grip on Varian’s jaw tightening. “By now, you should know a prison when you see one.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all are so cute. The comments and enthusiasm have detoxed my kidneys. Thank you! Have some more miserable Varian.

Two isn’t a particularly big number, at least not by most metrics, but when it came to Varian’s recent tally of being abducted, it seemed pretty substantial. Was it his fault? Translating that ancient language for Rapunzel had been a fun challenge, and knowing that Demanitus had crafted the code himself was too fascinating to ignore. But in doing so, had Varian set himself up for this? Was the cipher really safer with him, or should he write it down somewhere for Rapunzel to lock up, so these people would have a non-living target to go after?

And how selfish was he for thinking that?

The Saporians had touched down their hot air balloon within the open trunk of the massive tree, in a chamber that would have appeared man-made if not for the strange, uneven curvature of the living walls. Kai, being roughly the size of a mountain and twice as strong, had easily led Varian into an adjoining chamber. This was another circular room, smaller than the one they’d landed in. In the center, a deep pit took up much of the floor space.

“You know, when you think about it, this is hardly good karma,” Varian had tried. Kai had always been preoccupied with the idea of karma and something he vaguely referred to as ‘vibrations’, and if Varian could appeal to that, maybe he could find some sympathy. Maybe it was just Andrew who really had it in for him.

But Kai only laughed. “Bad karma is you turning your back on us,” Kai had answered easily. Clearly, he had already done the mental gymnastics necessary to justify abducting and hurting a teenager. 

When Clementine and Andrew joined them in the smaller chamber, Varian didn’t have time to think of a different approach. “Welcome to your new home,” Clementine had announced, gesturing ominously to the pit beside where the group stood. 

“Let’s get on with it,” Andrew said. “We have a meeting with our new benefactor.”

It was all the preamble Varian was going to get. In the next instant, Kai shoved him clear toward the pit.

Varian stumbled. With his arms still bound behind his back, he had no way to keep his balance, and Kai had not pushed gently. The ground dropped out from underneath his feet, and he fell. A shout of surprise and fear belted out of his mouth as he dropped. He hadn’t gauged how deep the pit was, had no way of knowing how long he’d fall, if this was how he died, and then just as fast as the ground had dropped out from beneath him, it slammed into his side hard.

All the air flattened out of him. Varian lay there, unable to breathe for one, two, three, four, his chest burning as adrenaline flushed through him, unable to numb the pain of landing. His bones had creaked from impact, and it was only after what felt like an eternity that he was able to draw a breath back into his lungs.

Gasping, Varian struggled to roll over even a few inches to look back up. The drop was perhaps ten, maybe eleven feet. Not as dramatic as some of the other holes he’d fallen into, but deep enough to hurt upon landing, and certainly too deep for him to climb out of. The walls were formed from smooth wood, not a grip to be found. As he lay there struggling to catch his breath, vines slithered over the top of the pit, weaving together until something resembling a net covered the entire thing.

“We’ll be back for you later,” Andrew called, his voice echoing down from somewhere near the entrance to the room. “Don’t go anywhere.”

Their laughter vanished with them, and suddenly, he was alone. Varian looked around desperately, but there was nothing, nothing, nothing. His body protested every movement, his shoulder howling with pain after landing on it. Dislocated, maybe? Had something broken? 

Eventually, he settled partially on his other side, in only to get off of his injured shoulder and the hands still bound behind his back. Panic came in waves, ebbing and flowing as his body continued to try and jumpstart him with adrenaline. 

At the bottom of the pit, there was nothing he could do but wait.

And wait. 

And wait.

And wait.

Eventually, Varian found it in himself to sit up, which required no small amount of effort and a fair amount of groaning. He had not landed too far from the wall, and so he scooted toward it and leaned his back against it.

“Okay, Varian,” he exhaled, looking once more up at the vines laced together across the opening of the pit. “Okay. This isn’t ideal, but, uh… I mean, it’s not ideal.”

He wasn’t sure what he was trying to say. Maybe the act of talking was enough of a self-sooth to be efficient, though, because his breathing was evening out. Aches and pains made themselves known in their own time, but he wasn’t going to simply lie there feeling sorry for himself. Right?

Right. Varian tested the strength of the ropes binding his wrists. They had held fast so far, but the manhandling and twisting around had revealed their flexibility. He could probably get his hands free with enough maneuvering. 

As he twisted his wrists, careful of his aching shoulder, his mind turned to next steps. It was difficult to avoid panic altogether, but he knew now what he knew the last time he’d been kidnapped, when Cassandra had trapped him in a cage of black rocks: Rapunzel was coming. One way or another, she had always found a way, and he had faith that this time wasn’t going to be any different. Max had witnessed the Saporians kidnapping him, after all, and they hadn’t taken Ruddigar with them, either. The raccoon was far more clever than most people gave him credit for. Along with Eugene’s quick cunning and Lance’s determination, this would probably just be a waiting game, like the last time had been.

But… This was different, wasn’t it? He was already hurt, with no promise that the abuse was over, and Andrew had mentioned Zhan Tiri. As impossible as Varian wanted it to sound, it made sense. Someone, or some _ thing _ , was pulling strings, that much they knew. Why not an ancient demon who hated Corona?

Anxiety bubbled like gasoline in his stomach and he forced himself to breathe deeply despite his tight chest. Lance had coached him a bit on breathing through anxiety and it worked, usually.

Provided he wasn’t being held prisoner in a giant evil tree at the hands of people who wanted to kill him.

The anxiety spiked considerably at the thought, but before it could spiral, he felt the ropes around his wrists start to strain and give, and he poured all of his focus into getting them off. His hands ached as he struggled to twist and pull them out of the tight loops of rope, but slowly, steadily, they were slipping out, until all at once, they sprang free.

“Ah-ha!” he belted, desperate for the victory. He pulled his hands around in front of him and tugged the now-loose rope off of his left wrist, throwing it across to the other side of the pit. His wrists and hands were pink from the effort, but the skin hadn’t broken. He rubbed them carefully.

“Not very useful without your science, are you,” a voice crooned from the top of the pit, startling Varian badly enough that he nearly leapt from his skin. So distracted by getting the ropes off, he had not noticed a shadow fall over him from above.

Standing at the edge of the pit, peering down on him through the woven vines, was a young girl in an ornate, old-fashioned dress. She was, at a glance, grey. Upon closer inspection, she was also familiar.

“Who…” Varian started, his frown deepening as he tried to place where he knew her face from. “Who are you?”

“My dear boy, we’ve already met. Don’t you remember me?”

Varian moved to say no, but something stopped him. He  _ did _ know her from somewhere, but it was as if the memory had been plucked from his mind, leaving only the impression of familiarity. 

At his lack of a response, the girl fanned her hand against her chest as if offended. “Such a shame,” she sighed, “and here I thought we had bonded. Do you really not remember? You need to use the sun…”

“To see the sun,” Varian finished quietly. As if the words had summoned it, the memory of how he knew this girl came flooding back. “That dream. But, how- I don’t know who you are, how did you end up in a dream before I even--”

“Don’t waste your energy trying to find logic in magic, dear. You’re going to need it if you want to survive here.”

Varian’s mind raced. The girl has begun strolling around the parameter of the pit, unhurried. As she walked, she spoke.

“I’d had plans for you in that tower. It was disappointing that they had to be delayed, but you’d served your purpose at the time. You’ll soon learn, I can be exceedingly patient.”

“The tower,” Varian repeated, more to himself than the girl. He hadn’t seen her there, he was sure he’d remember that. Had she been hidden somewhere, observing?

And then he remembered Cassandra, speaking quietly and furiously to herself as if someone else was there.

“You’re… who Cassandra was talking to,” Varian said slowly, watching for some sign in her expression or posture that would give him an answer. What he got was a grin, far too wide on her face, that sent a shudder right down the length of his spine.

“There’s that clever mind that deciphered the scroll,” she said, sounding far too satisfied. “And here I thought they’d beaten the sense right out of you.” 

Varian set his jaw and moved to stand, one arm wrapped around his middle and the other one used for support against the wall as he rose to his feet. “Who are you,” he asked again, this time with more determination. His legs were unexpectedly steady beneath him as he rose to his full height. 

“Oh come now, you’re so close,” the girl chided, her tone more aggressive now. “Think, boy.”

And he knew. He did, but he wanted so badly for the theory to be nothing more than that: a theory. 

“Zhan Tiri,” he said, before he could stop himself. At the sound of the name, the girl stopped pacing directly across from him, that horrifying and unnatural smile pulling back the corners of her mouth. 

“Very good,” she said, steepling her fingers and leering down at him from above.

“What do you want from me? I translated the scroll already.”

“That scroll no longer concerns me. This was once my home, you know. Long ago, before that wretched alchemist Demanitus destroyed it from within.” Zhan Tiri began pacing again, that same slow, steady stroll. “This place houses all sorts of secrets. Including scrolls from the chambers of Demanitus himself. And since he insisted on writing everything in that cipher,  _ you, _ boy, are going to translate them all for me.”

Varian’s shoulders tensed. After everything he had been through—the amber, the automaton attack he’d orchestrated on Corona, prison, the Saporians and their attempted takeover, Cassandra abducting him—the one certainty that had emerged from it all was that Varian was done letting anger and hate get the better of him. He knew now, had seen it time and again, both first- and secondhand, that hatred only led to more pain and suffering.

He stood upright and leveled the demon above him with a determined glare. “I will  _ never _ help you.”

He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but his defiance seemed to bore the girl. Zhan Tiri sighed and stopped pacing. “No,” she sighed, “the sundrop has corrupted you, hasn’t she? A pity I wasn’t freed from my prison sooner—we could have done wondrous things together.”

“No,” Varian said, shaking his head and feeling his resolve harden. “You want to destroy everything. If you put any of those scrolls within my reach, I’ll shred them to pieces just to keep you from having them.”

That, finally, seemed to permeate the casual indifference on the girl’s face, and she stopped. Her expression morphed into something inhuman, hideous and frightening, a flash of the true beast that lingered just beneath the skin of the puppet it was inhabiting. Almost as quickly as the snarl had appeared, Zhan Tiri’s face smoothed back into a confident, easy grin. “Such energy,” she mused, and curled her lip in a cruel smile. “Don’t worry, boy. You’ll happily translate all of them for me. All it’ll take is the right method of convincing you.”

The Saporians, Varian realized. He was suddenly aware of his aches and pains--a bad shoulder, sore ribs, an aching head and smarting cheekbone. The threat of physical violence was inelegant, but effective. And yet, Varian had gone to extreme lengths to do what he thought was right before. His father, his friends, his kingdom would be in danger if he caved. 

“I don’t care what Andrew and the others do to me,” he said, trying to sound more brave than he felt. “I won’t help you.”

Zhan Tiri laughed. It wasn’t what he expected, but Varian held his ground. Once he’d said it, he knew he meant it.

“Foolish child,” the girl said, sneering down at him. “How brutish do you think I am? The Saporians have another job to do. Besides, I have a far more efficient way to get what I want.”

As she spoke, she extended her hand out over the pit, palm facing down and fingers spread wide. Drawn by her magic, the ground beneath Varian’s feet began to rumble. He stumbled and caught his balance, but in the narrow walls of the pit, there was no where for him to go.

Vines, glowing green with an unnatural magic, began to erupt from the ground around his feet and the walls surrounding the pit. They snaked through the air as if they had minds of their own. Varian felt one snag his wrist, his upper arm, his knee. He cried out, startled, and struggled against them, but they had a strength all their own, something he couldn’t hope to match. More and more of them ensnared him, pinning his arms to his torso. The ground fell away from his feet as he was lifted upward, suspended in mid-air in the center of the pit.

“Struggling will only make them tighter,” Zhan Tiri warned, smile audible in her voice. 

But Varian wasn’t paying her any attention. The anxiety from before had flooded back, and he struggled with no regard to his injuries, kicking and writhing to break free. It was useless. A vine wrapped around his knees and held them tightly together, limiting his kicking to only his lower legs. The vines trapping his arms to his torso grew tighter, tighter, his ribs creaking, breath squeezed out of him.

“Stop,” he croaked, his voice choked to near silence. The vines slowed in their assault, now that he was half-cocooned in them. One final tendril slithered around his head, covering his mouth and preventing any more pleas for mercy.

“Go to sleep, little alchemist,” Zhan Tiri soothed, that malicious grin on her face. Varian’s vision was growing spotty, colors running together and sound dulling in his ears. It was difficult to breathe, yes, but there was something more. Some sort of magic, forcing him closer and closer to unconsciousness. 

He moaned desperately, struggling to stay awake, to resist. Fruitlessly, he made one last effort and moving his arms. Nothing came of it.

The last thing he saw before sinking into the black of sleep was that cruel grin leering down at him from above.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is mostly a bridge to the next sequence of action and events, but if I don't post it on its own, it'll end up being extremely long and annoying to wait for, so here y'all go. We're gettin' somewhere. Train is a'rollin'. Literally and figuratively.

Ruddigar’s paws were pinpoints of pressure on his ribs, startling Varian awake from an otherwise deep sleep. 

“Augh, buddy,” Varian groaned, rolling onto his side to dislodge the raccoon’s paws from his sternum. Ruddigar chirped and stepped instead onto the side of Varian’s chest, climbing onto him in an attempt at waking him up.

“Varian,” his father’s voice called from somewhere else in the house, “time to get up!”

Grumbling into his pillow, Varian pulled the blankets up over his head in a moment of stubborn, sleepy defiance, but with another chirp from Ruddigar, he sighed and moved to get up.

“Man, you’re heavier than I remember,” Varian muttered, lifting Ruddigar off of his chest as he sat upright. He rubbed at his ribs and frowned. They still felt tight, but he didn’t linger on it.

Today was, after all, the day where he and his dad were going to have some actual quality time together. Even after the amber, with both he and his father making more time for each other, it was difficult to schedule it. Quirin had all sorts of responsibilities with Old Corona, and Varian had new responsibilities in the capital helping Rapunzel. The opportunity to spend an afternoon with his dad was about on the same level as a birthday, and he wasn’t about to miss out because of stiff ribs.

Springing from bed with enthusiasm, Varian dressed as quickly as he could and crammed his feet into his boots in record time. He always dressed quickly in an attempt at avoiding the chill of their old drafty home, but today, both the cold and his sense of urgency felt unusually pressing.

Downstairs, Varian found the front door propped open to let in a draft of fresh spring air. Outside, his father was using his full weight to sink a hoe into the thawing earth. He had already created a few neat rows for planting, suggesting that Quirin had been up for some time.

“Morning, dad,” Varian greeted cheerfully, descending the front steps and heading toward his father. “Need a hand?”

This had become something of an inside joke between the two of them over the last year. Varian had not inherited his father’s body type, nor any of the strength or physical endurance that came with it. His insistence on offering to help with heavy lifting and manual labor had become a reliable opportunity for his father to make a light-hearted joke at his expense. 

“Actually,” Quirin answered, “I have a favor to ask you. I need your help with something very important.”

Varian blinked. It was unusual for his dad to skip the opportunity to poke fun at him, but the prospect of his father asking him for help with ‘something very important’ was far too exciting for him to be bothered by the small change in routine.

“Really? I mean, of course! What is it?” If for no other reason than to appear casual, Varian stooped to pick up Ruddigar, who had followed him out of the house and was brushing against his shin. 

“It has to do with the Brotherhood,” Quirin responded, and all at once, the buzz of joyful anticipation was silenced. Varian blinked at his father, mind suddenly and unhelpfully blank of any kind of response.

They had had a “conversation” about the Brotherhood, which is to say, a frustratingly vague and halting exchange with little to no information actually presented. Varian’s deep curiosity had pried what little it could out of his father, but it clearly distressed Quirin to talk about it, and after a while, Varian had realized that the boundary wasn’t one he should test. He had determined that he’d have to wait for his father to be ready to tell him. 

For it to be brought up so suddenly was unexpected, to say the least.

“I,” Varian started, unsure what to say, “Uh. I mean, sure, I’m happy to help. With, uh, what? Exactly?”

Ruddigar squirmed in his arms, sensing the strange shift in mood. Varian wasn’t usually caught off guard so easily. 

Quirin sank the blade of his tool into the earth using his body weight, and then left it there, sticking straight up. He sighed, resting part of his weight on the tool, and gave Varian an encouraging smile.

“After everything that’s happened, I decided to open my old chest. The one I always told you not to go near.”

“Yeah,” Varian confirms, though how his father knew that Varian had any awareness of the chest, he wasn’t sure. He’d never been caught examining it or picking at the lock, which he had tried many times as a child. As far as Varian had known, his father had no idea he’d ever found it.

“It’s full of old treasures from long ago. Some of them I saved because they were important to me. Others, because I knew they were important to the larger story of the Brotherhood. Those documents, however, are in a language I don’t know.” As he spoke, Quirin lifted his weight off of the tool and looked down at his son with a strange, intense gaze. “I’m hoping you can translate them for me, son. Perhaps together, we can discover more about the Brotherhood.”

_ Together. _ Varian felt a flutter of possibility and hope in his chest at that single word. He’d spent so long trying to tag along with his father on everything the man did. To have his father tag along with  _ him, _ to see what Varian was really capable of, was all he’d ever wanted. 

“That would be great,” Varian said automatically. As he spoke, his confidence in the statement bloomed. “Are you sure? Because I have all my notes from when I deciphered that scroll for Rapunzel, and maybe there’ll be some correlation between the two ciphers, which would be  _ fascinating _ \--”

Quirin laughed, and placed a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Of course, Varian. I’m so proud of you.”

Joy and pride shone through every corner of his being at the words. Varian’s smile grew even brighter. The opportunity to show his father just what he was capable of was suddenly here, right in front of him. It was dizzying, how thrilled he felt. 

He couldn’t wait to get started.

-

It wasn’t that Cassandra hated Andrew. 

Well, to be fair, he was a self-centered back-stabbing liar with no regard for the lives of anyone who didn’t directly serve his ambitions. Even so, she had known as much from the first time she’d met him, had been aware that he was playing her clear up until he’d tried to kill her and steal that book from the chamber it was locked in. And while she wasn’t keen on seeing him again, she also wasn’t about to wring his neck.

At least, not at first.

“Cassie,” he had greeted, his tone appreciative in the same way that wolves appreciate a stag, “I’ve gotta say, you look great. I really vibe with the recent independent streak, by the way.”

She had known they were there. Had been given at least some semblance of a heads up by the ghost-turned-living-girl who had been guiding her these last few months. It wasn’t enough time to fully prepare for seeing Andrew’s smug face again, however.

“Go choke,” she responded, her tone disinterested and annoyed. 

“Ah, that’s no way to treat an old flame. You’ve gotta learn to let that anger go,” Andrew replied, in that same infuriating tone. Ironic, given the circumstances that had brought Cassandra to this situation in the first place.

The great tree was about as expansive as she remembered from when she, Rapunzel, and the others had travelled through it together. It felt like a lifetime ago, but Cassandra knew that their journey through the tree had, at the time, almost certainly cemented Cassandra’s fate. And now here she was, back again to find that the tree was a different landscape entirely. 

Still large and labyrinthian, but with far less plant life filling up the inner chambers. It was as though it had all withered and died, though whether it was a result of Rapunzel singing the moon incantation or the tree itself collapsing was impossible to say. 

Regardless, the Saporians were an unwelcome addition.

“I don’t need their help,” Cassandra said, addressing the ghost girl and abruptly turning from Andrew to cut him out of the conversation.

The ghost girl considered Cassandra with that expression she usually had, a look just shy of patronizing. “You will need an army to defeat Corona, yes?”

“They’re not an army,” Cassandra argued. 

“Perhaps not. But any strong leader has an inner circle. And like it or not, they have already done a great deal of ground work in preparing us for our next battle.”

“And what’s that? They failed at their take-over of Corona, they failed at blowing it up, and they landed right back in jail like the  _ losers _ they are.”

“We succeeded where you failed, Cassie,” Andrew cut in, his tone infuriatingly casual. 

Cassandra leveled a sharp glare at him before turning back around to face the ghost girl directly. “What is he talking about?”

The entire conversation seemed to be boring the ghost girl. She sighed, turning away from Cassandra and pacing idly across the ancient floor of the chamber they were gathered in. “When you last faced her, you let the Sundrop escape with that little alchemist. The Saporians have retrieved him.”

For a moment, Cassandra wasn’t sure what she’d heard. She turned toward the Saporians, looking for some sign that she’d misunderstood, but the three of them all looked satisfied, like they were enjoying this moment of supposed victory. 

“For someone who’s already been abducted for what he knows, he was surprisingly easy to grab,” Andrew answered. He was watching Cassandra closely, taking obvious pleasure in the expression on her face. 

“Nevermind that,” the ghost girl said. “What’s important is that you have more resources at your disposal, and you will need them for what is to come.”

“Why do you need Varian,” Cassandra interrupted, turning back toward the ghost girl. She wasn’t going to let the conversation turn to anything else. Not yet, anyway. “The scroll was already translated.”

The ghost girl sighed, a brief huff of annoyance as if it should be self-explanatory. “There are plenty of scrolls that need translating. All of them will benefit you.”

Cassandra moved to argue, but had nothing to say. A sick twist in her stomach was not a good reason to change plans, even if she knew deep down that it was because she didn’t want Varian to get hurt. She hadn’t when she’d taken him the last time; she didn’t now. He had given her plenty of reasons to hate him in the past, but now more than ever, Cassandra felt that she understood his anger. Varian wasn’t her enemy; Rapunzel was. 

But she had no argument for this, at least not one that anyone else in the room would agree with. So she closed her mouth and closed her fists and put it to the back of her mind, until she was alone again.

If he was going to be their prisoner, she would at least go find the kid and make sure he was alright. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is really long! Whoops.
> 
> Man, some of you have so many fantastic theories about where this story could go, and I desperately wish I could make them all happen. I hope what I've got planned is satisfying, even if it's different from what you might be expecting!
> 
> Unrelated piece of life advice: don't break ribs! Just choose not to. DARE: To keep kids off broken ribs. It's literally the worse.
> 
> Which is why Varian has 'em. Gotta vent somehow, my dudes,

Years ago, in a well-meaning attempt at getting Varian to practice his experiments inside where the rest of Old Corona wasn’t put at risk, Quirin had cleared out the old cellar below the house and offered it to his son as a workshop. Then only twelve years old, Varian had been thrilled to have his own space. Quirin had built him a work bench, had cleared the dusty jars of old preserves off of the shelves so Varian could use them for storage, and had left the cellar in his son’s care.

Now, four years later, the cellar looked as though Varian had been occupying it for decades. It was full of experiments and contraptions he hoped to one day finish; the walls were pocked with scars from old explosions and mishaps; the shelves were cluttered with jars, bottles, and beakers, all labelled and re-labelled with whatever strange substance was inside them. Books cluttered most available surfaces, and one of the walls was covered with notes and schematics, string connecting different related scraps of paper in some mysterious, disorganized organization.

The last time Quirin had really spent any time in the cellar, he had been encased in amber. This uncomfortable fact tightened Varian’s shoulders when they entered, but his father didn’t seem phased by the thought. Rather, he was looking around as if he’d not been in the room before, examining experiments with a strange, critical eye. Varian, so excited to be working on a project with his father, didn’t take too much notice.

“Are these your notes from the Demanitus cipher?” Quirin asked, stepping up to the wall of schematics and string.

“Huh?” Varian glanced over his shoulder from where he was clearing items off of his work bench. “Oh, some of them are. Early attempts at translating. I had to figure out whether the symbols were letters, or sounds, or hieroglyphs. Took forever.”

His fathered hummed a single note, something between curious and disappointed. It was enough to draw a look from Varian, who set down the books he’d collected on another table. “Why do you ask?”

Quirin had been supportive of Varian helping Rapunzel translate the scroll. Had encouraged it, even, because after Varian had confessed to his father all he’d done while Quirin was trapped in the amber, it was clear to both of them that amends had to be made.

“Oh,” Quirin replied, standing upright and smiling warmly at him, “I would just like to see your work on that, one day. You put so much time into it.”

Varian smiled back. He rubbed at his shoulder, finding it strangely stiff. “Well, ah, most of the real work was destroyed when, you know… Cassandra. But it’ll probably be the same process for this new cipher, so you can see the whole thing!”

Quirin’s grin tightened just a bit, but he crossed the space and set down the scrolls he had been carrying on the cleared workbench. Varian made a show of cracking his knuckles before unfurling the first scroll.

For a few moments, he was silent, examining the characters and structure of the document. His father stood patiently over him, waiting for some indication that Varian knew where to begin. After a moment, the young alchemist grinned up at him.

“Do you want the good news, or the great news,” Varian offered, a playful lilt to his tone. Quirin smiled down at him expectantly, and Varian couldn’t bring himself to wait for an answer. “It looks really similar to the other cipher. That’s the good news. The _great_ news is that I think Demanitus himself wrote this! The handwriting is really similar, and a lot of the characters are the same. I should be able to translate it in it’s entirely pretty easily.”

“Wonderful, son,” Quirin beamed, placing his huge hand over Varian’s stiff shoulder. A startling flash of pain made Varian wince, there and gone so quickly that it was more of a surprise than a burden. Varian blinked up at his father, who removed his hand and laughed. “Sorry, Varian. I don’t know my own strength. Do you have any sense of what the scroll says?”

Varian’s eyes returned to the scroll. He rolled his shoulder, expression tightening and the stiff ache that he found there. “Well, there’s no way to know what it really says until I can figure out the exact translation key, but, let me see…”

His eyes turned over the old parchment, ignoring the ache in his shoulder. It was becoming more obvious to him, in the same way that the tightness in his chest was becoming difficult to ignore. He shifted uncomfortably and tried to focus on the scroll.

After a stretch of silence, Varian had forgotten about his physical discomfort. The contents of the scroll had captured his complete focus.

“Uh, dad?” He asked, not looking up from the writing. “What do you know about these scrolls, besides that they belong to the Brotherhood?”

“They’re important to our history,” Quirin said vaguely. “Understanding what they say may be the key to keeping Corona safe.”

Varian frowned at the symbols on the page. It wasn’t a perfect translation, so it was possible that he was missing something. But even without knowing the exact cipher, the contents of the scroll didn’t seem like they could be used to keep _anything_ safe.

“It’s just,” he started, glancing up at his father hesitantly. “Well. This is talking about… I think it’s talking about a weapon? _‘To destroy all enemies’,_ is I think what this part says here. Maybe… it’s best if we don’t translate them, don’t you think? I mean, the scroll I translated for Rapunzel made things way more complicated and dangerous, and I don’t think—“

“I understand your concern,” Quirin interrupted, “but the Brotherhood has been around for a long time, and has had many enemies. That could be referring to anything, yes? The only way to know if it’s truly dangerous is to translate it.”

Varian looked at his father carefully. It was unlike Quirin to be anything but cautious. His eyes dropped back to the scroll in his hands. His father may not know it by looking at the scroll, but with Varian’s experience, he knew a bad idea when he saw one. A creeping sense of wrong was beginning to prickle across the back of his neck.

“Son,” his father soothed, placing his hand once again on Varian’s smarting shoulder, “trust me. Don’t you want to protect the kingdom? The best way for us to be prepared is to arm ourselves with knowledge. With the forces that are stirring, Corona is in danger. You’ve already let the kingdom down once. You don’t want to do it again, do you?”

Varian flinched, withdrawing from under his father’s hand.

Sure, he had anticipated a negative reaction when he first told his father what he’d done. He wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if his father had disowned him, given how far off the rails Varian had gone. But Quirin had listened quietly to the whole story, had patiently let his son take all the time he’d needed to tell it, and when it was all out in the open, Quirin had brushed a stray tear off of Varian’s cheek and said, _“It seems to me that you’ve punished yourself enough, Varian.”_

And that hammer Varian was expecting to fall? It never came down. There was no shouting, no declarations of disappointment, no shunning. His father had accepted the story in its entirety and had trusted that Varian had grown beyond that hatred.

To have it brought up so suddenly was like being smacked.

The two of them stared at one another for a beat of loud, ringing silence. Quirin’s expression was firm, unwavering. Varian didn’t know exactly how to feel. Shocked, yes. Hurt that his father would so suddenly change his attitude about what Varian had done. But his mind was unhelpfully blank, his face hot with embarrassment and shame. He floundered for a moment, mouth agape.

The scroll crumpled a bit in his tightening grip, and his father’s stare did not waver.

-

Stupidly, the Saporians had left their balloon right where they’d landed it, which was only one chamber over from where they had dumped Varian. Whether this was due to their being confident in their hostage-taking, or was simply dumb oversight, Cassandra couldn’t tell. Either way, it made it easier to find what she was looking for.

As she approached, she began to notice the vines. There were only a few as she neared the entrance to the chamber, but they grew more and more in number, as if the area were becoming increasingly wild and abandoned. By the time she reached the entrance to the room, she was standing on a carpet of them, all twisting together as the vines snaked toward a pit at the center of the room.

Cassandra’s frown deepened. She didn’t know what to expect, but she knew enough about the great tree to be cautious. Driven forward by stubborn concern, she entered the chamber and made her way alongusing any gap she could find in the vines, trying not to step on them directly. Something told her not to.

When she arrived near the edge of the pit and looked down, it took her a disorienting moment to recognize what she was looking at.

Suspended in the air in the middle of the pit was a small human shape, wrapped in and held up by dozens of vines. Varian hung there, eyes closed as if in sleep, looking like a nightmarish puppet.

It’s strange, the way that some instincts can lay dormant inside a person no matter what they’ve been through. Cassandra would’ve thought herself far beyond what she did next, except the second she saw a familiar face in such a disturbing situation, her body moved before she could plan out what she was doing. She jumped into the pit, a single wedge of black rock coming up to meet her feet half-way down. She landed easily enough, agile as she was, and wove her limber form through the ropes of vines to get closer.

“Varian,” she said uselessly, as he was clearly unconscious. “Hey, kid!”

The closer she got, the more real the scene became. From this angle, only about three yards shy, she could look up at Varian and see the bloody scrapes on his cheek, the bruising, the shadows darkening under his eyes. His expression was almost blank, except for the slightest wince, betraying unconscious pain.

Yes, Cassandra had abducted him. She had stunned him with a fist to the stomach, carrying him out of Demanitus’s chamber on her shoulder. Had slung him over a horse while he was still out cold, and had fled Corona. She had done so because she needed the scroll, and because she didn’t want Rapunzel to have it.

She hadn’t wanted to _hurt_ him. Scare him, fine. If it meant that Varian wouldn’t do anything stupid or dangerous, if it meant he would tell her what she wanted to know, she would scare him all she needed. Heights, she knew, would work. 

But this wasn’t scaring the kid. This was torture.

“Varian,” Cassandra tried again, this time with far more authority in her tone, “wake up. Hey, come on.”

No response. Varian just hung there, tightly cocooned in those strange vines.

A memory struck her. Hector, eyes glowing green, wrapped in vines and being used as a puppet to attack them. A sick twist pulled in her stomach at the thought of Varian opening his eyes to reveal a green glow, and she closed the distance between them. She extended both hands, and grabbed at the vines that held the kid up, fully intending to pull him loose.

The instant she gripped the vines, she was somewhere else. A rush of sensation and visuals that weren’t her own, weren’t familiar, certainly weren’t the vine-filled pit she had just found Varian in, all rushed by her. Disoriented, Cassandra held fast to the vines. The images rushed by, most too quick to process, before suddenly slowing to a recognizable scene.

She was… in Varian’s lab? Standing by the door, looking in. She could see Varian, sitting on a stool and holding an unfurled scroll in his gloved hands, looking… confused? Heartbroken? Resigned? Whatever it was, it was distressed. And beside him, towering over Varian’s small form, was Quirin.

Only, it wasn’t Quirin. Because the shadow that the man cast upon the wall was a huge, hulking black form, with curled horns on either side of its head.

Cassandra let go of the vines, and stumbled backward. She was back in the pit, and Varian was suspended in front of her still, eyes closed.

For a moment, it was all she could to do catch her breath. Cassandra looked down at her hands, heart pounding, before lifting her gaze back up to the vines.

She’d seen this before.

Hadn’t she?

No. She’d been told about it. In the House of Yesterday’s Tomorrow, while Cassandra was off alone, discovering the truth of her lineage, Rapunzel had been trapped in a dreamscape created by the monster that ran that house. Cassandra could remember the way that Rapunzel talked about it, how it had felt so real, except for little details that proved otherwise.

That house had been sustained by one of Zhan Tiri’s devotees. This had to be the same magic. Right?

Cassandra looked upon the vines like someone might look upon a kettle that had just burned them, but somehow, she knew what she had to do. Drawing a breath, she stepped forward, and reached out her hands.

And hesitated. Did she really want to do this? She didn’t want to see Varian hurt, but he hadn’t exactly extended that same kindness to her a year ago when he’d tried to overthrow Corona. Besides, she had given up so much already. Why hold out for this kid?

Cassandra lifted her eyes. Varian’s face was bruised, bloodied, his expression frail. It was so hard to imagine him having ever been the villain, but not because of the sorry state he was in now. It was because he looked so… young.

Just a kid.

Cassandra steeled her expression, and grabbed the vines.

-

“I… I’m sorry, dad. I want to help, I _really_ do, but… I just don’t think it’s a good idea to translate something that could do a lot of harm. If I hadn’t translated the Demanitus scroll, Cassandra wouldn’t have known the third incantation, and—“

Quirin stood upright, an imposing mass of disappointment, towering over Varian in a way that he couldn’t remember his father ever really towering before. Varian shrank back, that sickening twist of _wrong_ flaring in his stomach once more.

“I’m disappointed in you, Varian,” his father said. Varian shrank further into himself and dropped his gaze, cheeks burning.

“”I’m…. I….” Varian’s voice had gotten small, tight. His chest was so stiff, his shoulder aching with louder and louder throbs, harder to ignore with each passing moment. He had no idea what to say. The impulse to cave, to change his mind, to agree and translate the scrolls, was almost impossible to ignore. He was so desperate to get back to the proud smiles, the hand on his shoulder, the sense of excitement at getting to work with his father on something so personal.

But he… he meant it. And maybe it was all Rapunzel’s influence, but Varian just couldn’t go down that road again, of inviting danger and harm into the lives of others so flippantly.

Whatever he might have said, however, was completely lost when the sound of the cellar door slammed open.

Both Quirin and Varian turned, startled by the sound. A long black rock had erupted from the ground at an angle and thrown the heavy oak door wide open.

Varian stood abruptly up off the stool, a spike of panic piercing through him. The shame and heartbreak from his father’s disappointment was almost overshadowed by the sudden anxiety. Where the rocks back? They shouldn’t go anywhere near it. Where was that chemical that had created the amber? Please, don’t let it be anywhere near that black rock, or his father, or him, or—

Quirin grabbed him by the upper arm, moving so quickly that Varian blurted a startled shout in response. His father immediate began to drag him toward the storm doors that led outside, away from the black rock.

“Woah—dad! Wait, I—“ Varian stuttered, his father hauling him up the stone steps and around to the front of the house in impossible time, as though he were skipping steps. In what felt like seconds—how could it feel so fast?—they were in the house again, up the stairs, and at Varian’s bedroom door.

“Stay in here,” his father instructed, his voice hard, angry, but it didn’t sound directed at Varian. Before his son could reply, Quirin all but threw Varian into his bedroom, and hauled the door shut behind him.

“Dad, wait!” Varian cried, racing back to the door and moving to pull it open, only to find it locked. How was it locked? It only locked from the inside, and he hadn’t even heard a key turn. “Dad! _Dad!”_

Panic burned his stomach and squeezed at his chest, his aching, too-tight chest. Varian pulled desperately at the door, hoping that perhaps it was only jammed. His dad couldn’t go down to the cellar near that rock. The amber, dad, _the amber, not again—_

“Varian.”

Varian whirled around, shouting in surprise. A hand clapped over his mouth mid-cry in an attempt at muffling it. Standing in front of him in her full moonstone armor, was Cassandra. She was holding the index finger of her free hand against her lips, looking over Varian’s shoulder at the door his back was pressed again. He went absolutely still, ears ringing with confusion and fear.

“Varian, listen to me” Cassandra said. “This is a dream. You’re not really home, that’s not really your dad, and you need to _wake up_. I can’t keep that thing busy for long. Do you understand?”

Her hand was still pressed against his mouth. Despite this, Varian shook his head, eyes wide.

Cassandra set her jaw and took a deep breath, her eyes flicking back and forth as her mind raced to find the right argument. “Do you really think your dad would ask you to translate scrolls if they were a threat to anyone?”

When Varian didn’t move, or indicate that he was going to resist, Cassandra dropped her hand. Varian stared at her, breathing hard. Breathing shallow. Cassandra noticed this.

“Your breathing,” she said. “Is it hard to breathe? You’re ensnared in vines that are squeezing you too tight.”

Somewhere else in the house, far enough away that he almost missed it, he heard his father call his name. Quirin’s tone sounded angrier than it did worried.

“You have to wake up,” Cassandra said again, more insistent, more desperate. “Come on, kid, think. How did you get here? Why are you in Old Corona instead of in the capital working on something for Rapunzel?”

Varian opened his mouth, and nothing came out. He had no idea. He _was_ supposed to be in Corona, wasn’t he? How had he gotten home? Why hadn’t he noticed before? There _were_ a lot of inconsistencies today. Things that didn’t fit.

_“Varian,”_ his father called again, this time closer, storming back up the stairs.

Cassandra set both her hands on Varian’s shoulders, and this time, the contact didn’t cause him any pain. She looked him dead in the eye. “Varian, please. Wake up. _Please.”_

His throat tight with fear, Varian stared back at Cassandra with huge, desperate eyes, and told her the truth. “I don’t know how.”

-

Cassandra stumbled away from where Varian was suspended in vines. She was breathing hard, had no way of knowing if the adrenaline and fear thrumming in her veins was her own or absorbed directly from Varian. Above her, his eyes were still closed. The only change was that his expression looked far more distressed, pain and fear and confusion all evident in the pull of his eyebrows. But he wasn’t waking up.

“Damnit,” Cassandra growled, frustration at the futility of her attempt taking over. She reached behind her back, and drew her sword.

It wasn’t elegant, when she brought her blade down through the vines. Just a clean sweep of force, right down along Varian’s left side, as close as she dared to get without hitting him. The vines split like warm butter under the black rock blade, and with so many vines suddenly unable to support his weight, Varian dropped in stages. The vines that were wrapped so tightly around him either split or loosened, and Varian’s weight dropped to the left as they did so. Cassandra dropped her sword on instinct and reached out her arms to catch him in the knick of time.

The vines themselves reacted quickly to the sudden severing. They began to retract, slithering back up out of the pit and away from them as Cassandra lay Varian carefully on the ground, one knee propped under his upper back as she cradled his head.

“Varian,” she said, trying to prompt a response. For a tense moment, he simply lay there, limp and unconscious. Stiffly, his arms fell away from where they’d been pressed to his side. Without the vine pressed across his mouth, it was easier to see how pale he was underneath the bruising on his cheek and temple.

Cassandra’s heart was pounding. Moreso then her need for Varian to wake up, she knew she had to get him out of this pit. He had been strung up like that by someone’s design, and she was realizing that cutting him down didn’t mean he wasn’t about to get pulled back up by those same vines.

“Come on, kid, wake up,” Cassandra urged, impatience and concern competing for the emotional spotlight.

Varian’s eyelids fluttered. His eyebrows pulled together in pain and confusion, and he moaned, coming around. When he opened his eyes, they had a disoriented glaze. He frowned up at Cassandra, not really processing what he was seeing.

“Cass?” He asked quietly, still relatively limp in her arms. Weak, she realized, and not about to get that strength back in the next few minutes. Asking him to get up and run was out of the cards, which meant Cassandra had just committed to a whole lot more than cutting some vines and letting Varian try to escape on his own.

She took a deep breath, and not for the first time, wondered exactlyly what she’d just gotten herself into.

“Hey, kid.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hark! A chapter! 
> 
> Shout out to Whiskibusiness for the wonderful fanart!! You've got this show's style nailed, my dude: https://whiskibusiness.tumblr.com/post/190881723966/like-blood-from-a-stone-chapter-1-vaguenotion
> 
> I'm a professional illustrator, so I'm absolutely 6000% charmed by the idea that people like this story enough to draw art for it!! What a neat group y'all are. Thanks everyone!

The jail was cold, and damp, and echoing, and every other adjective that belonged to dungeons both near and far. It was also familiar, in a way that Rapunzel never anticipated when she first arrived at the castle. So many of their adventures brought them down there, and it seemed as though everyone in the group had had their turn being locked behind the bars of one cell or another.

So it was with confidence that the princess descended the wide stone steps into the dungeon. At the guard’s station, she found Pete, out of breath and doubled over near the desk. He was just finishing his report to the stationed guards that the princess was on her way. Word travelled fast in the castle, but not as fast as Rapunzel when she was on a mission.

She breezed by without slowing, a quick “thank you, Pete,” trailing behind her as she went. In her wake, Eugene and Lance appeared, both of them also winded from trying to keep up with her. 

“Hold up, Blondie,” Eugene pleaded, jogging to get to her side and catch her hand before she could go any further. She obliged, but she couldn’t help the flash of urgent irritation that she felt when her feet stopped moving. “Listen, I know you want answers, but there are ways to get information. Trust me, I’ve been though enough interrogations to know how they work. If you storm in there and let them know what you want right away, they’re going to have a card to play.”

“Better to trick them into it,” Lance agreed, pressing a hand to his abdomen as if to sooth a cramp. 

Rapunzel took a breath to center herself. “I appreciate it, you guys, but they already know that Andrew, Kai, and Clementine have escaped, and they probably know why. I don’t know how we can trick them.”

“Leave that to me,” Eugene said, confident in a way that Rapunzel hoped was genuine.

The cells that the remaining Saporian separatists occupied was down a long wing of cells. There wasn’t a lot of daylight to be had through the narrow stone windows, but daylight wasn’t easy to come by underground in the first place. Rapunzel followed the braziers until she found them.

The occupants inside either cell were both lounging, waiting with smiles on their faces for the princess to arrive. They had heard them coming. 

“Princess Rapunzel,” the woman greeted, leaning back on a stack of pillows behind her on the hard cot that hung from the wall. “Why ever would you deign to visit us?”

“Perhaps it’s charity,” the man in the other cell posited, his tone snide. 

Rapunzel squared her shoulders and moved to speak, but Eugene’s hand on her shoulder brought her up short. He glanced once at her, almost imperceptibly. When she nodded, he stepped forward. 

“Guys, guys, try not to be too intimidated,” he said, a suave grin on his face. “I know that you both-… Well, I don’t actually know your names. Stovepipe Hat Guy, I don’t even remember you. Were you part of that revolt?”

“Eugene Fitzherbert. Andrew said you were all talk,” the woman answered on behalf of her male counterpart. Eugene turned his attention her way. 

“Now see, I recognize you, at least. Tell me, when Andrew abandoned the two of you to rot in prison forever, did he happen to mention why? What made the other two so much more useful and important to him? Childhood bond? Did they owe him money?”

“Andrew didn’t abandon us,” the woman cut back, her words just a bit too defensive. “You think it’s that simple?”

“Well, no, I’m sure there’s a whole convoluted mess of a plan going on behind the scenes,” Eugene shrugged, “but see, we have a report from several guards of him saying ‘forget the others’ as they fled, and let me tell you: as someone with experience in abandoning coworkers to get caught by the law, I know a classic Burglar Bail when I see one. Lance, remember that time? With the crown?”

“The Stabbingtons are  _ still _ in prison,” Lance chuckled. 

The woman’s face shifted, anger and doubt creeping into her features. “He didn’t say that,” she said hotly.

“Oh,” Eugene turned his attention back to her, “he definitely did. So we’re wondering, maybe it’s because you’re not as loyal to the whole Saporian thing after all. And if that’s true, then maybe you’d be interested in our Separatist Rehabilitation Program that we’re starting?”

“We’re loyal to Saporia,” the man cut in, anger clear in the throw of his voice. He stood forward and gripped the bars of his cell, glaring. 

“If you’re so loyal,” Lance asked, “then why did he leave you here to rot? When he said- Eugene, buddy, what was it that he said when he ran off?”

“Forget the others,” Eugene repeated slowly, emphasizing each word while staring the woman right in the eye. 

“They didn’t abandon us,” she reiterated, jumping off of her cot and stepping up to the bars of her own cell. “They grabbed that little traitor because our benefactor asked for him, and when they get back from that old tree, they’re going to spring us out of here and we’re  _ all _ going to get our revenge.”

“Old tree,” Rapunzel repeated. She had been standing in the background, forgotten but listening closely. The woman gave her a startled look, realizing what she’d let slip. 

Eugene turned and frowned at Rapunzel, his mask briefly slipping. “The old tree where we found the destruction incantation?”

“And Eugene and I almost became plant fertilizer?” Lance added, mild trepidation in his voice. 

“Who is your benefactor,” Rapunzel said, ignoring both of their questions and stepping up to the bars. “ _ Who _ had Andrew and the others kidnap Varian?”

But after her slip up, the woman had stepped away from the bars, and a wall had slammed up. She wasn’t about to say anything more. 

“Cassandra?” Lance asked quietly, genuine concern shining through his voice.

Rapunzel flexed her hands into fists and took a deep breath. It was hard to imagine Cassandra ever working with Andrew. But then… It was hard to imagine Cassandra doing a lot of the things she had done.

“Listen very carefully,” Rapunzel said, her voice uncharacteristically low as she stepped up to the bars of the woman’s cell. “We are going to get Varian back. If you tell me where he is, and who wants him, then I will do whatever I can to get you a reduced sentence here. But if you don’t help me, and Varian is in any way hurt when we find him?”

She leaned forward, and the woman leaned back, caught off guard by the intensity radiating off of the princess. When Rapunzel spoke, her voice had a dangerous edge that not even she recognized. “On your head be the consequences.”

-

As soon as Varian was able to sit up on his own, Cassandra began to walk back what she had done.

Because they needed him, according to the ghost girl. And because Cassandra  _ did _ want to succeed at her goals, and if that meant having Varian translate old texts, then so be it. Maybe there was a reason that he’d been in those vines. Maybe it was the most humane way to get him to translate anything, if the vines were just a little looser. Had she made a mistake? Had she acted too impulsively?

Varian was breathing deeply and carefully, one hand pressed flat to the side of his chest as if to splint his aching ribs. He looked nauseous, like he’d been spun around far too quickly for far too long. Cassandra lifted her eyes up to the top of the pit, but there was no movement above.  _ Yet, _ she thought, her jaw clenching. 

This had been a mistake.  _ (But it hadn’t been, had it?) _ She had trusted the ghost girl this far. Was this really where she was going to draw the line?  _ (Those vines had been suffocating him.)  _ If she had gone through all that just to agree that he should be strung back up, she’d have to deal with Andrew’s smug satisfaction.  _ (He was just a kid.) _

Varian said something, so quietly that Cassandra didn’t hear it at first. She looked up sharply, startled from her internal struggle, to find Varian looking at her warily. When she didn’t react to whatever he’d said, he repeated himself. 

“Thank you,” he muttered, quiet and sincere. Cassandra’s stormy mind calmed in an instant. She stared back at him, even after he looked away, carefully rolling his shoulder to assess the extent of the damage. Based on the tightness of his face, it wasn’t good.

“Here,” Cassandra said, moving toward him. To her own ears, her voice sounded too concerned. When she spoke next, she made sure her tone reflected her frustration with the situation. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

She reached for Varian’s shoulder with the intention of checking the injury, but before she could make contact, he flinched away. Cassandra stopped short, mid-reach. Both of them stared at one another for a long, difficult stretch. 

“Do you know who she is,” Varian asked in that same small voice.  _ “What _ she is?”

“What are you talking about,” Cassandra cut back, her words sharp. “Either let me take a look at your shoulder or don’t, Varian, but my charity is about to run out.”

He watched her warily, but didn’t say anything, and didn’t move when she reached for him again. Experienced from years of injuries while practicing combat, Cassandra examined his shoulder with deft hands, checking the collarbone first and working her way out. Without asking permission, she undid a the top few buttons of his vest and pulled at the side of his shirt collar, tugging it open to look at his shoulder more closely. Pink swelling brushed with hints of purple stared back, a larger bruise forming where he must’ve landed on it. When she guided his arm out and rotated it around the joint, it moved without cracking, shifting, or clicking. 

Varian accepted the examination without a word, beyond small sounds of pain that escalated when she moved his arm. When she was satisfied with her assessment, Cassandra sat back on her heels and dropped her hands into her lap. 

“It was dislocated, but it popped back in. Not much you can do for it besides leave it be.”

As she spoke, she dropped her eyes to the apron still tied around Varian’s waist. With a quick gesture, he seemed to understand her intention, and he single handedly untied it behind his back and handed it to her. It took very little effort to tie it into a sling for his left arm.

The alchemist rubbed his shoulder and adjusted the sling until it was comfortable, glancing up at her through his bangs. So close, Cassandra could see the gears turning in his head as he struggled to make a decision about something. Unwilling to wait, she stood and looked again to the top of the pit. There were still no signs that anyone was around.

“The grey girl,” Varian said carefully. “Do you know who she is?”

“A friend,” Cassandra said, her words clipped. Memories of the last time she was alone with Varian rose to the front of her mind, the desperation in his voice as he pleaded with her to stop what she was doing. If he was about to launch into another sanctimonious lecture, she’d leave him right here in this pit.

But Varian didn’t say anything. Perhaps he heard the anger in her voice, or somehow sensed her uncertainty in her own answer. With difficulty, he rose to his feet, unsteady but not about to fall over. He still had that look on his face like he was trying to think of what to say. It was a sharp contrast to how he’d been when they’d first met all that time ago, all impulse and excitement and no filters whatsoever. 

Now, Varian stood across from her, taller and older, weathered by the things he’d been through. Whatever he was wrestling with, Cassandra could see the moment he made his decision. 

“You need to know, Cassandra. That girl is—“

“Well, look who’s back on his feet,” Andrew’s voice cut in, loud and abrupt from above. Varian flinched, eyes widening some as he looked up to find the Saporian standing at the edge of the pit. How Cassandra hadn’t heard him coming, she had no idea. 

“Get out of here, Andrew,” Cassandra warned. “This has nothing to do with you.”

The man above only smiled, spreading his arms as he spoke. “I disagree,” he insisted, voice infuriatingly calm. “We worked hard to get that little brat to our benefactor, and she wouldn’t be happy to know that you let him out.”

“I don’t  _ have _ a benefactor,” Cassandra said sharply. “I don’t work for anyone. I’m in charge of my own destiny.”

To her immediate fury, Andrew laughed. “Is that what you think? Tell me something: did you know ahead of time that we were going back to Corona to kidnap Varian? Because the way I remember it, you were completely surprised to learn that he was here.”

Cassandra clenched her fists. She could feel Varian’s eyes move to her. “What you get up to has nothing to do with me. Unlike you, I don’t take orders from anyone.”

“No?” Andrew’s grin widened. “Because it sounds to me like someone  _ else _ is pulling the strings.”

Anger bottlenecked in Cassandra’s mouth, tongue tying her for a moment. She was blinded by the desire to wipe that smug grin off of Andrew’s face with brute force, her hands closing into tight fists. She could feel veins of black rocks at her fingertips. All it would take was one well-timed strike--

“Anyway, buddy,” Andrew drawled, turning his full attention to Varian, who shrank under his gaze. “You’re either going to translate those scrolls for us now, or you’re going back to dreamland with more bruises. Your choice.”

Cassandra drew her sword, and stepped in front of Varian. It was one thing if the ghost girl was there to present a reasoned argument. Andrew throwing his weight around and acting as though he were in charge was an entirely different matter, and one she was unwilling to abide.

Andrew blinked in surprise, momentarily thrown by Cassandra’s intervention. He laughed, though it sounded uncertain. Some of his confidence had faltered. “Really? You’re going to throw yourself on a sword for this kid, Cassie?”

It was, more or less, what she’d been asking herself since she cut Varian free. And maybe Varian would still end up her prisoner, if she really needed those scrolls like the ghost girl said. But it would happen on her terms, and absolutely not with Andrew’s involvement. Cassandra set her jaw and planted her feet. 

“You don’t get to call me that,” Cassandra replied, voice dark. “Just him.”

She jerked a thumb over her shoulder to indicate Varian, and then lifted her hand straight up. A platform of black rock rose beneath their feet, lifting both her and Varian up from the bottom of the pit. The kid made a startled sound and just barely managed to keep his footing. 

Before anyone could say anything else, Cassandra readied her sword, and lunged at Andrew.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I want you to visualize the clap emoji like, twenty times here. If I could use it, that's all this comment would be.
> 
> ... Actually, add one coffin emoji because Varian is in hell. But mostly it would be clap emojis.

By the third swing of Cassandra’s blade, Andrew had backed up at least nine feet, and showed no indication that he was done with his retreat. Cassandra advanced with calculated swipes, coming close but never actually making contact with her target. 

To his credit, Andrew drew his own weapon, but he must’ve known it wouldn’t do any good against the black blade that bore down on him, because he only used it to parry. 

As the both of them moved along the parameter of the room, Varian took a quick step off of the black rock platform that Cassandra had raised. He only had so much attention he could spare to their combat; most of his focus was dedicated to staying on his feet. The room reeled around him slowly, a nauseating tilt that he couldn’t quite shake off. With shallow breaths and stiff muscles, he started toward the entrance to the chamber. 

In the back of his mind, he recognized that Cassandra had just stood to defend and protect him. And certainly, it went a long way to confirming that the Cassandra he knew was still in there. But in the moment, all of his instincts had narrowed to one thing:  _ Get out. _

He scrambled over the carpet of twisting roots and out of the chamber, his eyes scanning desperately for any that may be moving, glowing, reaching, but they all lay flat and lifeless on the ground. It was all he could do to keep moving and not trip over them; the fear that they may at any moment come to life and ensnare him again was too great.

In his hurry to get away from the roots, Varian nearly ran right into the hot air balloon that the Saporians had used to bring him to the tree. It was right where they’d landed it, and abruptly, it gave him something invaluable:

A reason to focus his panic. 

He knew how to fly one of these. Hell, he knew how to  _ build _ one, which meant Varian was practically an expert on the subject of air balloon travel. If he could get it out of the tree without anyone shooting him down, then he’d be able to outpace any pursuit. 

A laugh bubbled up from somewhere deep inside of him, hysterical and breathless. He’d made mistakes during his stint as a villain, but none of them had been this glaring.  _ Morons, _ he thought with dizzy glee, his eyes moving to the engine on the side of the basket that propelled the balloon forward at altitude. It didn’t appear to be out of order—he just had to get it started. 

Behind him, he heard rustling just in time. He spun and dodged instinctively to his left, narrowly avoiding Kai’s massive hand as it grabbed for him. 

“Who let  _ you _ out,” Clementine asked from somewhere behind the large man. Varian scrambled away, using his free arm to support himself on the side of the basket. Kai was fast, but the vines had spread out here, and his foot caught on one. Varian managed to dodge again just as the big guy fell to his hands and knees beside the balloon.

In the other room, Varian could hear the sounds of swords clashing. It was growing closer, as though the fight had changed directions. 

Varian scrambled around to the far side of the balloon before Kai could recover, and hauled himself over the side of the basket with whatever adrenaline was keeping him on his feet. Leaning as far as he needed to to stay out of Kai’s uncoordinated reach, Varian reached for the controls above his head, twisting valves with desperate, shaking hands.

Clementine saw what he was doing, and rushed forward to stop him. Kai—still struggling to get his foot free of the vines—stumbled right into her path on accident.

“You idiot,” Clementine yelled, “stop him!”

The familiar hiss of gas grew louder the further Varian turned the main valve. With all his strength, he grabbed onto the metal pull cord and hauled his knees up, curling them toward his chest in order to use his full body weight to pull it down. 

Fire erupted out of the spout above his head, just inside the opening at the bottom of the balloon. 

It ascended faster than Varian would’ve guessed, but not fast enough to avoid Clementine and Kai both grabbing the edge of the basket. As they lifted off the ground, their weight dragged the entire balloon awkwardly to the side, out of range from the opening above them. 

Varian held onto the basket wall opposite the Saporians, his feet sliding awkwardly down as the basket sloped. He had to get them off of the balloon immediately, or they would all crash, and his chance at escape would be ruined. Thinking fast, Varian’s eyes caught movement down near his boots. A tool kit that had been at the bottom of the balloon’s basket was sliding by.

Varian wasn’t thinking anymore; he was reacting. With a lunge that he hadn’t thought through at all, Varian let go of the basket wall and slid down to catch the tool kit. His feet hit the opposite wall and braced against it for support. The balloon listed dangerously toward the wall, and Clementine was making progress hauling herself into the basket, having less weight to pull up than Kai.

He unhooked his arm from the make-shift sling that Cassandra had made out of his apron, and pulled open the tool kit. On impulsive, he grabbed the first recognizable tool, which happened to be a wrench. Below him now, Clementine was just about to pull herself into the basket. Varian lifted the wrench, and with all his strength, brought it down on her hands.

The older woman howled, and dropped. Varian felt the basket jolt as she caught hold of Kai’s ankle, but it was no use: Varian brought the wrench down on Kai’s hands next. It took two blows to get the man to let go, and not before he tried to re-grab the basket. When he did drop, the basket lifted so abruptly that Varian was dropped back not the floor, the air pushed from his aching chest. The basket righted itself, and the short cries of fear from Kai and Clementine came to a halt as the Saporians slid down a sloped wall and tumbled to the ground below.

Varian pushed himself up, heart in his throat. He thought he might be laughing, but he couldn’t hear much of anything over the rush of blood in his ears. The balloon was ascending rapidly now, up toward the opening at the top of the broken tree. 

_ He had made it! _ At the rate of speed this balloon could go, he could be back in Old Corona before long. In the safety of his home, with his dad there, he didn’t have to fear Andrew or the Saporians or Cassandra or anyone else who might try to take him away.

Cassandra. Shaking badly, Varian managed to climb to his feet and peer over the edge of the basket. Kai and Clementine were rubbing their backs and moaning on the ground. At the mouth of the room that Varian had been kept in, the sword fight was spilling out onto the vines, streaks of black and silver flashing around one another. Cassandra moved like lightning, all fury and focus. If she hadn’t looked up, she may have continued the fight without ever realizing the scene before her.

As it happened, she caught sight of the balloon, drifting into a column of sunlight above. She faltered in the fight, and when Andrew tried to take the window of opportunity to lunge at her, she simply stepped back, lifted a hand, and brought a cage of black rocks up around him, trapping him in place.

With Andrew abruptly out of commission, Cassandra turned to give her full attention to the scene. In the time she had spent taking out her anger on the Saporian leader, Varian had managed to commandeer a hot air balloon, and was about to escape.

Even from the distance they were at, Varian could see the calculation on Cassandra’s face. He looked back with exhausted, open fear. The mirth of his victory over Clementine and Kai dissolved in his mouth. Cassandra had the black rocks: endless, unbreakable spikes that she could draw up at will. If she wanted to puncture the balloon, she could. Very easily.

She knew this too, but was hesitating.

“Well, Cassie?” Andrew asked, sounding snide even in the rock bars that surrounded him. “You wanna be in charge of your own destiny? Fine. Does that mean letting the alchemist escape, when he could be your key to power?”

Varian stared down at her. She had cut him from the vines, had defended him from Andrew, had given him an opportunity to get away. Had she done all that only to drag him back to that terrifying demon girl? 

From where he stood, Cassandra didn’t seem to know either. 

-

Cassandra had no idea what to do. 

The thrum of black rocks pulsed at her fingertips, offering solutions, but she couldn’t be sure what the right move was. She wanted time to think, and had none of it.

If she sent up a spike and impaled the balloon, Varian would end up right back in the hands of the Saporians, unless Cassandra was willing to keep fighting them.  If she let him get away, and she later determined that she  _ did _ need him after all, then she’d be angry at herself and have to listen to Andrew’s self-satisfied, sanctimonious “I told you so”s. Worse yet, she may need to go after Varian again, which was an idea that she didn’t relish. 

She wouldn’t give Andrew any authority or power; she couldn’t let Varian get away. 

But… But if she was  _ with _ Varian, then he technically wouldn’t have escaped her. She could land the balloon away from the Saporians, and demand an explanation from the ghost girl just as soon as Andrew wasn’t around. Varian wouldn’t escape, the Saporians wouldn’t win, and Cassandra would stay in control.

Decision made, Cassandra sheathed her sword, spread her feet, and drew up a huge black rock beneath her. Rising up with great force, the rock launched her straight up into the air and propelled her in an arc directly toward the balloon.

She heard Andrew shout something, but she didn’t pay it any mind. She landed easily in the basket of the balloon, sending Varian tumbling back in surprise and panic. He stayed down, propped up on the elbow of his good arm, staring up at her with confusion clear on his face. 

Cassandra turned her hard gaze down toward the Saporians, growing further and further away as the balloon lifted out of the tree. Uncertainly pressed into her gut alongside her determination.

_ What the hell am I doing? _

-

“Cassandra-- what are you--” Varian started, and then stopped, too many questions crowding into his mouth as he scrambled to process what had just happened. “What are you doing?” 

Varian pushed himself into a sitting position with difficulty, holding his bad arm close. Cassandra ignored him, turning instead toward the valves and pull cords that hung above the center of the balloon. As she reached up to adjust them, panic drove Varian unsteadily to his feet, his hands grabbing at her arm.

“Wait,  _ please, _ Cass, listen to me, I can’t go back down there! Don’t--”

Cassandra turned and pushed him away, but did not retract her arm when he grabbed it tighter for balance. As the balloon reached higher into the clear sky, she leveled him with an intense look, her face the very picture of conflict.

“Calm down,” she said. Hypocrisy if Varian had ever heard it, given how rattled she looked. But he kept his mouth shut, staring at her with huge, pleading eyes. “If I wanted to shoot you down, I would have,” she clarified, eyes flickering down toward the Saporians far below. “Just give me a minute.”

He hesitated, but after a pause, his hands unclenched from around her arm. He took a step back to lean against the side of the basket. As he slowly got his breath back, all the aches and pains he’d accrued were starting to make themselves known. 

“Sit down,” Cassandra instructed, clearly seeing the pain growing on Varian’s face. “Just… I need to think.”

For a few moments, he did as he was told and sat down quietly. He needed the respite too, if only to catch his breath and calm his racing heart. He was exhausted, yes. But despite his injuries, his fatigue, his fear, Varian was not about to sit idly by and let Cassandra choose his fate for him. If he couldn’t physically escape, then at the very least, he could argue.

“The moonstone has power equivalent to the sundrop,” he said, his voice quieter than he expected it to be. “You have the third incantation, Cass. You don’t need anything else.  _ Please, _ let me go.”

“Don’t,” she replied abruptly, and then stopped herself before she could say anything else. She was tense, glaring at the valley below as the wind began to move them westward. Cassandra gripped the edge of the basket, her shoulders up to her ears with frustration as she worked through some internal struggle.

Varian watched her warily, and held his tongue. He was slowing down now, curling inward with pain and fatigue. For a moment, at least, he felt he had time to take stock of how he was doing.

His shoulder was pulsing with a sharp, quick kind of pain. He hadn’t felt it when he was escaping.  _ Probably the adrenaline, _ he thought warily. His chest still felt tight, and it ached in a few spots, but he wasn’t having difficulty breathing. Not like before, in the vines, when they were constricting and tightening and  _ squeezing. _ His dad towering over him, his eyes not quite human, his voice not quite his dad’s.  _ I’m disappointed in you, Varian.  _ The anger in his voice as he threw Varian into his room, locked him in, how it was all wrong,  _ I’m disappointed in you-- _

“Varian,” Cassandra interrupted him. He opened his eyes and found that he had a cold sweat of panic on the back of his neck. With only a moment of hesitation, Cassandra took a knee in front of him and studied his face carefully. 

“Did you hit your head?”

He frowned, confused for a moment as to what she meant. Had he? It had been a clumsy and rushed attempt at escaping in the balloon. Maybe he had. 

Then he realized what she was referring to, and he shook his head. “No,” he answered. “Andrew kicked me.”

Cassandra stared at him, her gaze hardening. “In the head,” she clarified.

“Yeah.”

She answered him with a deep sigh, pinching the bridge of her nose. “That piece of shit,” she muttered, so quietly that Varian almost didn’t hear her. When she straightened, she reached her hands forward and adjusted Varian’s arm back into the makeshift sling that had been hanging around his neck like a scarf. He let her do it, wincing as she worked his arm into the sling.

“You probably have a concussion,” she said. “Your pupils are mismatched. You’re hurt enough, Varian, so don’t try anything stupid, alright?”

If he had been in better shape, he may have hesitated. As it were, he could see no reason to hold back now. “Please, Cass. I just want to go home.”

She stood and turned away from him, twisting one of the valves above to stop the balloon from rising any higher. She didn’t answer him, but there was a reply in the way she avoided his eye, glared out at nothing, took measured breaths. She didn’t know what to do, and she hated it.

After another minute of tension, Cassandra took a deep breath. “It’s not personal, kid,” she said, with just a touch of desperation in her voice, like she really wanted him to believe her.

_ It sure feels personal, _ Varian thought. He took a breath to say it, but never got the chance. Before he could respond, something shot by up near the balloon. There was the sound of ripping, of air escaping very suddenly. Varian looked up in time to see the crossbow bolt trail away through the sky and down to the forest, far away.

Cassandra dropped suddenly, avoiding another bolt. “Son of a bitch,” she spat, throwing herself into action. She grabbed the front of Varian’s vest and hauled him away from the wall of the basket where his back had been facing the great tree. Seconds later, an arrowhead pierced the wicker where he had been sitting--if she hadn’t moved so fast, he’d have been shot in the kidney.

Cassandra threw her arm out, undoubtedly drawing black rocks up around wherever the Saporians were shooting from. Varian looked up wildly. Inside the balloon, he could see pale daylight shining through the rip that the first bolt had torn in its side. He could also make out watery hot air billowing out of it at a rush.

The balloon began to sink. It was still travelling away from the tree, but at this rate, it was going to land in minutes. And not gently, either.

“We’re going to crash,” Varian called over the sudden rush of wind. Cassandra was dragging her arms in upward motions, still pulling rocks from the earth down below. The crossbow bolts stopped flying by, but they had bigger problems now.

“Cass,” Varian shouted, surprising himself with how much authority he packed into her name. She turned, followed his gesture upward, and found the split in the balloon.

“We have to slow our descent,” he instructed, stumbling to the side of the basket and reaching down to engage the thruster mounted on the side. 

If she was afraid, Cassandra didn’t show it. She just moved, all her years training with the castle guard clicking into action. “How do we do that?”

“Less weight,” Varian called over the wind. “Ditch the tool box and any other supplies that are in here!”

He didn’t watch to see if she did it; he trusted that she would. He kept his eyes on the balloon as they sank lower and lower in the sky, the expanse of forest below coming up to meet them. They were going to crash, that much was inarguable.  _ How _ they were going to crash was something that he still had some control over.

Another crossbow bolt sailed by a few feet away from where Varian was reaching down to adjust their proposition. Cassandra cursed again, hauling a huge coil of rope up and over the side of the balloon. She threw her arm out toward the great tree, calling up more rocks.

“Forget about them,” Varian called. “We’ll be out of their range in a minute! I need help!”

Cassandra was beside him in the next breath, leaning over the basket wall and helping him turn a valve he had been struggling with with only one hand. 

Suddenly, the basket jolted. Both of them cried out in surprise, bracing so as not to get knocked over. When Varian stood and looked down, his stomach dropped.

Tree tops. They had just struck one, and more were about to collide with them. Varian’s mind went blank, too overwhelmed by calculations and trajectories, solutions that wouldn’t work, wouldn’t work,  _ wouldn’t work-- _

“Hold on,” Cassandra commanded, wrapping one arm around Varian and bracing for a bad landing. On instinct, Varian curled into her, wrapping his good arm around her middle just to hold onto something.

When they hit the first tree trunk of their descent, everything fell to chaos.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An update! It's mostly a bridge between more action-packed chapters, but no one is perfect. 
> 
> As always, thank you for the comments and support! They're so fun to read, I really appreciate it!

There was a time, not too long ago, where the thought of living out her years in the palace made Rapunzel want to scream and run. Doing mundane and repetitive tasks of state, or indulging in safe, reliable pastimes until she eventually died of old age had the same shine on them that her tower had had, and she’d been overly keen to reject them, even at the cost of her blossoming relationship with her father. 

Now, after a year abroad and with countless problems demanding her attention far and wide, a quiet stint spent in the castle’s peaceful walls sounded more than appealing. In an ideal world, without black rocks and celestial stones and evil demons threatening to destroy everything she loved, Rapunzel would spend her days painting, reading, trying every new thing as they came. She would ride horses and throw festivals and everyone would be happy and safe.

On Max’s back, she could close her eyes and imagine, if only for a few seconds, that she was racing Cassandra. She tried to imagine the sounds of their laughter, the free feeling in her chest. Light as a feather, with the wind in her hair and Max’s powerful muscles moving underneath her saddle, carrying her to victory. 

She opened her eyes, and the fleeting dream was lost. They’d been riding for some time now, and there was nothing idyllic about it. She was saddlesore and exhausted. It was out of character for her to carry such anger in her chest for this long, and she could feel the toll it was taking on her. Even still, conflicting thoughts warred in her mind, shoveling fuel onto the fire.

She knew Cassandra wasn’t behind this.

_She had no way of knowing if Cassandra was behind this._

Zhan Tiri was the one pulling the strings. 

_Was Cassandra the one calling the shots?_

Rapunzel had had no way of knowing that Varian had been in danger.

_She had known Varian was a target, she should have protected her friend better._

Varian wouldn’t translate anything for a demon bent on destroying Corona.

_Varian had once been bent on destroying Corona._

Beneath her, Max leapt over a fallen tree and landed harder than usual, knocking Rapunzel out of her inner conflict. Looking down, she could see the sun reflecting off of the sheen of sweat on Max’s shoulder. The horse was loyal and second to none in determination, but it didn’t take an expert to see that he was pushing himself too hard. 

Rapunzel looked over her shoulder. Eugene and Lance were not far behind her, on equally-exhausted horses. Between the two men, they were the embodiment of determination and worry, but she recognized her own fatigue on their faces. 

She turned her eyes forward. They had been following the long shadow of Cassandra’s tower, which fell over the road to old Corona like the shadow of a sundial. On horseback, it would take weeks to arrive at Zhan Tiri’s tree--with the air balloon that Varian had idling in a barn in Old Corona, it would be two days, possibly less if the wind was on their side. 

If things had been less dire, she would have pulled back on Max’s reigns and insisted that they stop and rest. If they only had the luxury of time--but the sense of urgency in her gut told her that they had to keep moving. 

“Almost there, Max,” she said, leaning forward and pressing her hand against the side of Max’s undulating shoulder. The horse whinnied with determination and pressed harder. “We’ll get him back.”

-

Varian moaned, thin and raspy and unfamiliar to his ears. The wicker of the basket was pressed against the side of his face, one arm dangling over the side into gravity’s reach. His knee ached where his lower leg also hung down, straining the joint. 

_Everything_ ached, come to think of it. Slowly, he forced his eyes open.

The world was blurry--the sunlight glared, far too bright in his eyes. Wincing, he struggled to clear his vision and make sense of what he was looking at.

Trees, with boughs sweeping back and forth gently in the breeze. Varian gradually realized that he was swaying too. With difficulty, he lifted his head.

All at once, his perilous position dawned on him. The basket of the air balloon was on its side, stuck in branches at least forty feet off the ground. He was lying on the wall--now the floor, technically--on his side, with one arm and one leg hanging over the edge of the basket. Above, stretched among broken branches, the shredded remains of the balloon threw a yellow-hued shadow over him.

Varian startled, shaking the basket badly. He grabbed at the side and froze, drawing in a sharp breath of fear as he realized how risky movement was. For a disorienting moment, he stayed as still as possible, waiting for something to come along and change his situation. Maybe this was a dream. Maybe he was closer to the ground that he appeared to be. Maybe Cassandra had a way down--

 _Cass._ With great care, Varian turned to examine the rest of the basket behind him. It was empty, if he didn’t count the arrow lodged in the side above him, or the hole punched through the floor where a particularly sharp branch had speared them. Part of it was bent inward, evidence of another impact. But no Cassandra.

Varian looked again toward the ground. He felt sick--nauseous from the heights, from the head wound, from the exhaustion. Probably from whatever magic that demon had done to him in those vines. With his spinning vision and the too-bright sun glaring down at him, Varian could feel his breathing picking up. 

Shit. _Shit._ He was either going to die in this basket from exposure, or the Saporians were going to find him and pull him down and kill him, or worse, drag him back to that awful tree, and then he’d never get away again, and--

“Varian,” Cassandra interrupted from somewhere below. Varian flinched and looked down desperately, relief flooding his chest at the sight of her. She was standing beneath the basket, looking up at him with relief that equalled his own. 

Her forehead was bloodied, and there was dirt and scrapes on her face. Pine needles and twigs interrupted the unnatural blue of her hair. But that armor--made of the black rocks--had clearly protected her. She must’ve been thrown from the basket, Varian realized. How it had been her and not him, given his wretched state, he had no idea. 

“Cassie,” he said back, a disbelieving smile pulling at his lips. Before his eyes, he watched her rise up toward him, a shelf of black rock beneath her feet. She only stopped once she was beside the basket, where she took a knee and rested a hand on his shoulder. 

“I can’t tell if you’re the luckiest or unluckiest kid in the world,” she said, guiding him upward slowly. “Easy now.”

Varian sat up, letting his legs fall over the side of the basket so that his feet pressed against the black rock’s smooth, glassy surface. Cassandra hooked her hands under his arms and lifted him fully onto the stone before the heights could make him hesitate. The rock lowered again, bringing them safely to the ground. 

“Any _new_ wounds I need to know about,” Cassandra asked, once Varian was seated on the soft, mossy earth. He looked down at his open palms for a moment before pressing them to his forehead and closing his eyes tightly. 

“Just more bruises and scrapes,” he answered quietly. “My head is killing me.”

“Yeah, well, you’re concussed,” Cassandra answered. “Listen, we can’t stay here. They saw where we went down. We have to put as much distance between us and this balloon as we possibly can.”

Varian squinted up at her through the too-bright sun. “Not to put a damper on things,” he said, fully aware of the irony, “but I don’t think we can outrun them. At least, I don’t think _I_ can.”

Cassandra considered him for a moment, taking in his sorry state. Somewhere in the crash, his vest had been torn open along his side by a branch that narrowly avoided impaling him. He looked more disheveled than when he’d first woken up on the floor of that pit to find her staring down at him. With a furrowed brow, Cassandra moved her gaze to the woods that surrounded them, gears turning behind her eyes.

“I don’t remember Rapunzel’s friends being such quitters,” she answered, slowly turning to look for possible solutions to their problem.

“I’ve never been accused of _that_ before,” Varian replied. “Is that why you followed me instead of shooting me down?”

This seemed to catch her off guard. Cassandra blinked, turning to look at him with… surprise? Offense? Irritation? “I’m not her friend anymore _,”_ she answered hotly.

Varian sighed. “I didn’t think I was, either.”

“Spare me the preachy bullshit, kid,” she cut back, turning her back to him and continuing her examination of their surroundings. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

As she spoke, Cassandra lifted one arm and fanned out her fingers. An aisle of black rocks appeared before her, spikes shooting up at random intervals and sizes, sprouting further and further away in one direction. A trail of breadcrumbs, Varian realized, to indicate that Cassandra had gone in a specific direction.

Cassandra turned back toward him when the sound of rising rocks grew too far and too faint to make out. “Can you walk,” she inquired. There was no room in her tone for anything but a direct answer.

“Yeah,” Varian answered quietly, though he didn’t sound entirely certain. He rolled forward, awkwardly climbing to his feet. The ground tilted beneath him, the forest spinning slightly, but he maintained his footing, not quite able to meet her eye.

Cassandra sighed, and turned in the opposite direction of the rock path she had just drawn up. “Good. Let’s move.”

-

For a long while, neither of them spoke. Varian trailed behind her like a kicked puppy, and she supposed in a literal sense, he was. He kept his eyes fixed firmly on the ground, stepping carefully to avoid trip hazards. Based on the mechanical way in which he walked, Cassandra guessed that every step was a small accomplishment for him.

This was not how she’d expected her day to go. The constant grappling for control over her own fate--that much, she was used to. She was getting familiar with how to fight that fight. Babysitting Varian, on the other hand...

Was he still a prisoner, if she had rescued him? Was he only following her because he knew he couldn’t survive on his own in the state he was in, or because he felt like he could trust her? Did he feel safe with her because she had the moonstone, or because he saw her as a friend?

She couldn’t let herself dwell on it. She had to keep her focus pinned on what was next. They were being pursued by the Saporians, and her tower was too far away. She had arrived at the Great Tree by stepping through a portal that the ghost girl had made, but to go back on foot… It would take weeks. Cassandra needed a destination, and a plan. 

The day had turned to evening. Light was slowly bleeding out of the forest around them, coming in at a lower and lower angle through the trees. Soon, it would be dark, and the few miles they had put between them and the balloon would be more difficult to track and navigate.

She could feel the gentle burn of hunger in her stomach, and she sighed. If she was getting hungry, Varian must’ve been starving. Not to mention the longer they went, the further behind her he got, until she found herself stopping every handful of yards to let him catch up. 

Up ahead, she could hear running water. They pressed on for another couple of minutes before the deer path they were following opened up to reveal a small bubbling creek. The mossy bed that ran alongside the water was plenty wide enough for them to set up camp, and a boulder rose out of the earth not far from it, providing a wall for them to put their backs against. If there was ever an ideal camping spot, this was going to be it.

“We’ll rest here for a few hours,” Cassandra announced, stepping into the middle of the clearing and turning to watch as Varian limped out of the undergrowth to join her. He looked around with foggy, uncritical eyes, and nodded.

“I’m going to go forage for something to eat. Don’t stray,” she warned. Varian only nodded again, far too exhausted to argue. She started back toward the trees, stopping to glance over her shoulder in time to see him kneel beside the creek. He looked so small, battered and bruised and drinking water from cupped hands like it was the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted. 

_He needs to go home,_ a small voice whispered in the back of her head. She turned abruptly toward the woods, perishing the thought. 

-

Making a fire would have been begging for the Saporians to find them, but without it, Varian was starting to shiver in the damp cold of the falling night. As the last dregs of daylight drained from the forest, he curled in on himself tighter and tried to coax himself to sleep in spite of the chill. 

Cassandra had returned after a time with mushrooms, berries, and some tree nuts. It wasn’t enough even for one of them, but it was better than nothing, and Varian had taken his share without complaint. Neither of them had spoken since her return. Cassandra was wrestling with whatever she was wrestling with, and he was weighed down by exhaustion.

And yet, he couldn’t get to sleep. And not because of the cold, or the hunger, or the aches and pains. There was something on his mind that he kept circling back to. Something that seemed, in the moment, entirely urgent.

Drawing a breath, he opened his eyes and peered through the darkness at the rough shape that Cassandra made in the night. 

“She freed him, you know,” he said into the quiet. If Cassandra reacted at all, he couldn’t tell, but he persisted. “She used the decay incantation, and melted the amber away like… like ice. After everything I’d done, she still… she kept her promise.”

Silence. And yet, Varian knew she was listening.

“My dad, he’s… He’s okay. Rapunzel didn’t give up on me, even after everything, and I’m just some kid she knows. You’re her _best friend,_ Cass.”

“What did I tell you about the preachy bullshit,” Cassandra cut back, her voice sharp in the darkness. Varian gazed sadly in her direction, and said nothing. After a weighted pause, he heard Cassandra sigh.

“I’m glad your dad is alright,” she said, her voice softer now. “Really, I am. But I don’t need you to ‘save’ me, or whatever it is you’re trying to do. I’ve chosen this path and I’m sticking to it. You should be more concerned about yourself right now.”

Varian hugged his arms closer around his chest, ignoring the tweak in his sore shoulder. “Look, I get it. You’re doing what you think is right. Just… don’t let it change who you are.”

Cassandra scoffed, but it didn’t sound entirely confident. “I’m not some storybook villain, Varian.”

He closed his eyes. Sleep felt closer now than it did even a few minutes ago, and he was starting to sink into it with alarming speed. “Bad guys never think they’re the bad guys,” he whispered, all the strength he had left put into getting the words out. 

When Cassandra didn’t say anything, he turned his face into the moss below his head, and let himself sink into the silence of sleep.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I finally did the responsible thing, and charted out the story beats for the rest of this fic. You know, as opposed to just... winging it. Which is what I've been doing so far, mostly.
> 
> And I'm pleased to tell you that now that I know where this story is headed, the next few chapters are going to be longer! Yay! But, uh, they're also going to be the last. There are about two chapters left, possibly three. It just broke down that way, once I figured out what I needed to accomplish in each chapter. 
> 
> In the meantime, if you ordered a healthy portion of Angst with some Emotional Hurt/Comfort on the side, this is the chapter for you. We're racing toward the climax, so get it while it's hot!

After everything, Varian was surprised to feel boredom. He hadn’t forgotten what it felt like; rather, over the last few days, he’d forgotten that it  _ existed. _ But here he was, sitting beside Cassandra as they rested in the shade of mid-day, falling victim to the monotony of travel. Incredible, given the circumstances surrounding their journey, but he felt bored nonetheless.

A full day had passed since he’d woken up on that mossy creek bed. His body had protested every movement, but Cassandra wasn’t going to give him an extra five minutes, even if he asked for it in his half-conscious state. She had sat him up, and handed him some more foraged food. With clipped words, she had instructed him to drink his fill from the creek, and then they had to go. There had been no conversation, no comfort in her presence beyond her familiarity.

Perhaps what he had said the night before had cut deeper then he’d meant it to. Perhaps it had achieved the opposite effect then what he was hoping for, and she was now angry with him. Like so many facets of who Cassandra was becoming (had become?) he couldn’t read her behavior, and so he chose to remain silent. Maybe that’s what they both needed.

Without conversation, a day of walking through forested countryside passed slowly. In an effort to keep his mind off of current anxiety-inducing events, Varian tried to focus on their surroundings. For much of the first day, the forest around them remained choked with dense undergrowth. Cassandra had to clear sections with her sword just so they could get through, but it was an unending maze of thickets and ferns and bushes loaded with berries that even Varian couldn’t identify. 

After several hours and two very frustrating hills, the forest began to thin. Among the thick red tree trunks, where undergrowth had been surrounding them for so long, beds of stone now rose abruptly from the earth at strangely even intervals. A mystery for Varian to focus on, at least for a while, until he recognized one of the mounds as the foundation for a long-gone home. The more they passed, the more he recognized their rectangular shapes, the indications of different rooms, and gaps for doors still visible here and there.They were passing through a village, he’d realized, and said as much to Cassandra. She had looked around with an unreadable expression, and told him to keep moving.

Sometime in the afternoon, they had stopped to rest in the shadow of a tall statue. The stone woman was half-sunk into the earth and shrouded in moss, with a fern sprouting from her shoulder. On the ground not far from her was her arm, broken off years ago, still pointing in the direction of the village they had passed through. Varian and Cassandra sat upon it to relieve their aching feet, and shared some berries that they had collected along the way.

That’s when the boredom began to settle in, and with that boredom, the illusion of safety. If Varian turned his head so that he couldn’t see Cassandra’s armor, it was surprisingly easy to pretend that he was simply exploring with a friend. After all, if the stakes had been less dire--and perhaps if Rapunzel had been with them--the things they’d seen would have been exciting. Perhaps that’s why he felt so comfortable when he finally broke the silence that had lingered between them for most of the day.

“Who do you think lived in that village,” he asked, looking in the direction that the giant stone arm was pointing. 

Cassandra didn’t reply. Undeterred, he continued. 

“Those ruins have to be hundreds of years old. I wonder if there’s a record of it somewhere in the castle.” He looked over to his companion, but she ignored him in favor of removing her sword from her back and laying it over her knee. Varian watched as she leaned forward and summoned a small block rock from the earth, and then set about using it to make her already sharp weapon sharper.

He lifted his eyes to the statue in who’s shadow they sat. “And whoever this was, she must’ve been important. Maybe she was a queen? Hey, what if she’s a distant ancestor to Rapunzel? Has the royal family been in power that long? I bet she’d be really excited to see this-”

Varian lowered his eyes from the statue to find Cassandra, shooting him a sharp look of warning, and his words died in his throat. All at once, his situation came crashing back into his awareness, and he closed his mouth. Wariness surged back into his gut. It must’ve shown on his face, the abrupt switch from his usual self back to frightened prisoner, because Cassandra’s expression soured oddly and she looked back at her sword without a word.

Varian stared at her. The anger radiating off of her was so strong he could practically taste it. 

But… she had  _ saved _ him. She had cut him down from those vines, had fended off the Saporians, had gone with him when he’d fled instead of shooting him down. She’d found him food and kept watch the night before while he’d slept. Cass-- _ their _ Cass, the young woman who he had named an element after--was still there. 

Which meant all this anger, all this aggression and hatred… It was a choice. One she was making consciously, again and again.

Suddenly, Varian couldn’t stand it. He had been so sympathetic toward her, had thought that he knew exactly how she felt, but she was right: he didn’t know. Because when Varian had gone after the royal family, he had been blinded by grief. He’d made selfish choices, had been guided by anger and feelings of betrayal. He was lashing out. He’d been very much in the wrong, he knew now, but it had been reactive. He hadn’t seen any other option, because his anger and heartbreak had given him tunnel vision. 

But what Cassandra was doing… She wasn’t just reacting to a loss. She was actively choosing to be pissed off, despite every olive branch and second chance offered to her.

He stood, so abruptly that it startled Cassandra’s attention back to him. His hands--even the one hanging from a sling--curled into fists. “When did you become such a martyr,” he said, startled to hear real anger in his voice.

Surprise pushed Cassandra’s eyebrows up. She looked at him with open bewilderment for one beat, two beats, before her expression hardened. “ _ Excuse _ me?”

Varian didn’t flinch; he glared back. “All this time you’ve been doing mental gymnastics to justify your anger toward Rapunzel, while simultaneously doing everything you can to help me. If you’re the same Cass I know, why can’t you do what you used to do, and  _ talk to us? _ This whole crusade you’re on, this- this selfish mission for revenge, can’t you see that there’s a better way to be heard?”

“You think,” Cassandra shot back, standing suddenly and facing him, “that because you threw a tantrum and lashed out at everyone who got near you, that you understand me, Varian? You think that’s what I’m doing?”

“Isn’t it?” Varian swept his good arm out to emphasize his point, desperation clawing up into his chest. “You sent a sea of red rocks into Corona and terrorized everyone! You’ve tried to kill Rapunzel  _ multiple _ times, and for what? Because you didn’t have an idyllic childhood?”

Her fist found the front of his vest and yanked him close. “You hypocritical  _ child,” _ she growled. “You want to compare lives we’ve put in danger? You wanna talk about attempted regicide?”

“I  _ know _ what I did was wrong,” he shot back, the volume of his voice rising. “It was selfish and reckless and cruel! But at least between the two of us, I know that about my own actions. You’re remaining willfully ignorant!”

“Willfully…?” Cassandra’s expression darkened, her lips pulled into a snarl. “My entire  _ life _ has been spent living in the shadow of what was stolen from me! You have  _ no idea-” _

“Oh, I don’t, do I? You’re angry because you think Rapunzel stole your mother from you, right? _ ”  _

Varian’s question hung in the air between them, stopping Cassandra short. Whatever made her hesitate, Varian didn’t know. Perhaps it was the way he said it, so bitter and frustrated and overwhelmingly disappointed in her that she didn’t know how to respond immediately. But he did.

“You  _ know _ the story. Gothel stole an infant from her cradle and locked her away in a tower just so she could stay young and beautiful. She was a selfish, manipulative witch. Even if she  _ had _ raised you, what makes you think she’d have been any more loving or kind? You were probably better off without her!”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cassandra cut back, volume rising. She tightened her fist around his shirt where it had gone slack. 

“What part?” Varian yelled, throwing his arm out again. “What part don’t I get? That your childhood didn’t look like what other kids had? That you never had a mother to turn to when you needed something? Or is it the whole ‘having a dead mom’ part that you somehow think I don’t understand?”

His words echoed in the immediate silence that followed. Cassandra stared at him, her expression shuttered with surprise and anger. Varian pushed her arm away, and she released his vest without resistance. 

He was too tired for this. His body ached, his head hurt, his stomach burned with hunger. And now tears threatened him, betraying him in spite of his best efforts to let anger lead. 

“Don’t tell me that I don’t know what it’s like to grow up without a mom. At least you didn’t have to watch yours get sick and die!”

Cassandra glared at him. Varian glared back, a single tear breaking over the dam of his eyelashes. He wiped it away immediately, upset that it was there in the first place.

He turned away, rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand. He was so tired. More than that, though, he was surprised at how quickly he had gone from calm to upset. It was as if all his fear and frustration from the last few days had surged forward at the first chance they had, and now that the flood gates had opened, there was no taking his words back. 

“You’re right,” he said, speaking before he even knew what he was going to say. He desperately wished his voice wasn’t shaking. “I don’t understand why you’re choosing to be this way, and I can’t help you. Okay? I give up, Cass. I’m  _ so tired, _ I just want to go home.  _ Please, _ just let me go home. You can be angry at Rapunzel without dragging me along like a rag doll.”

He didn’t care that he was begging. He didn’t care that he was lying, either, that deep down he still desperately wished for her to drop this act and tell him she understood. That she was sorry, that he was right, that she would take him home and make up with Rapunzel and things could all just go back to normal. 

But he was so tired of this, of being yanked around like a toy by anyone with an agenda. His agency had been taken away from him the second Kai had grabbed him in that alleyway, and he wanted it back. If Cassandra wasn’t going to help him, he’d have to help himself. 

“That’s not--” Cassandra started, her eyes flicking back and forth as she struggled to find the words she was looking for. “It’s more than that, it’s…”

She was beginning to flounder, her anger bleeding into something that sounded an awful lot like doubt. For a second, he thought he could see the old Cassandra.

“It’s what, Cass,” he asked, his voice quiet now, though still shaking. “You’re our  _ friend. _ You’re  _ my _ friend, even after everything. I looked up to you. I wanted to  _ be _ like you. What’s so important that it’s worth throwing away all the people who love you?”

Cassandra closed her eyes tight and drew a deep breath. Her shoulders tightened, and she clenched her fists, like she was fighting a war in her head and heart that was so vicious it was making her physical coil up tighter and tighter. It reached a boiling point, where she went very still, before she forced herself to take a deep breath. On the exhale, her shoulders lowered; her face relaxed; her hands unclenched. 

And when she finally lifted her head and looked at him, it was  _ Cass. _ All at once, her walls were down, and he was staring not at the Moonstone, nor a traitor of Corona, nor his kidnapper. He was looking at Cassandra, the way he remembered her before everything had come tumbling down.

“Varian,” she said, and there was a plea in her voice, the beginnings of an explanation. A  _ real _ one, one that could begin a conversation rather than a fight. “I never meant for you to get hurt in all this. And maybe I can’t explain why I need to do this, and… Maybe you’ll never understand. But I…” 

Her eyes moved to the sling his arm was in, and Varian watched as she made a decision. The clarity of her choice was visible on her face, a subtle but unmistakable shift in her features. Cassandra stood upright, squaring her shoulders. “I don’t need a bunch of ancient scrolls to achieve my destiny. And you don’t deserve to be treated like this.”

Varian blinked, his face falling slack with surprise. The smallest glimmer of hope sparked in his chest. He took half a breath to reply, to try and coax the decision out of hiding and encourage it. 

Before he could speak, they were interrupted.

“Aw, now isn’t this a sweet scene?”

Varian whipped around to face the sound of the voice, and his blood ran cold. Emerging from the trees with his sword resting confidently on his shoulder stepped Andrew, a wide grin on his face. Only feet behind him, Kai and Clementine approached. 

Andrew looked first at Cassandra, smug and satisfied, before his eyes dropped to Varian. His smile sharpened sickeningly. 

“Andrew,” Cassandra growled. She stepped forward at the same time that Varian stepped back. When he looked up at her in desperate panic, her mask was back on--the walls were back up. That brief moment of vulnerability she had finally allowed herself was nowhere to be seen.

“Cassie, I gotta hand it to you,” Andrew said, “you’re worse than I am. Dragging the kid all the way out here, letting him think you’re taking him home? That’s some psychological torture right there.”

The Saporian strolled forward at a casual pace, circling them at a safe distance out of reach of Cassandra’s sword. Kai and Clementine circled in the other direction, fanning out to cut off opportunities for escape.

“I’ll admit, you almost had us with that fake trail of black rocks. Good thing our mutual benefactor was there to point us in the right direction,” Andrew said, still circling. As he spoke, his eyes--and that wicked grin--never left Varian, like a wolf watching its prey.

Cassandra lifted her sword and pointed it directly at him. “Congratulations, you can follow footsteps.”

The man had the audacity to laugh. “Oh, it wasn’t actually that difficult once we realized what you were doing.”

“Is that so,” Cassandra cut back, her lip curling in a snarl. Varian glanced nervously toward Kai, to their right, and Clementine, behind them. Neither were within range, but they both looked ready to lunge.

_ Which means our best bet is back the way we came, toward the village, _ Varian thought. It was the only unguarded exit. 

“Walking the kid in a giant circle? Come on. That’s cruel.”

Varian blinked. His eyes moved back to Andrew, finally processing what he was saying.

“I’m not-” Cassandra started, but Andrew didn’t give her a chance.

“You’re buying time, so you can march him back to the Great Tree and take all the credit for capturing him again. Is it that important that you make all the decisions, Cassie?”

Something frosted over the inside of Varian’s ribs, a slow creep of cold that rose up from his stomach. He turned his eyes to Cassandra, waiting for her to deny it.

She said nothing. She was breathing hard, that tension from earlier rising within her. 

“See, Varian?” Andrew stopped pacing. “She was just killing time, wearing you down out here. Another day and you’d be right back at that tree where you belong. Only this time, Cassandra would be the one who put you there.”

“Shut up,” Cassandra shot back, lifting her sword where it had begun to lower.

Varian stared at her, waiting for something,  _ anything, _ to indicate that this was one of Andrew’s lies. “Cass,” he asked, his voice small, pleading for her to deny it.

“That’s not--” she started, turning half-way toward him without lowering her sword from Andrew’s direction. “I mean, at first, I-- Yeah, I was buying time, but-- Varian, listen to me--”

He took a half-step back from her. Andrew spoke before Cassandra could.

“Well hey, there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’, Cassandra. So now that the gig is up, hand the kid over to us so you can go make big decisions for your ‘destiny’, yeah? Don’t worry. We’ll take  _ great _ care of him.”

Varian took another step back. Cassandra turned toward him fully, her sword dropping to her side.

“Varian,” she pleaded, “I’m sorry. But I changed my mind! I meant what I said, I don’t want the scrolls, I--”

“You were going to give me back to that demon,” Varian said, his voice quiet with disbelief and dawning horror. All of Cassandra’s behavior over the last two days--her short temper, her carefully maintained distance--it all took on a sickening hue. Was Andrew right? Had she just been weakening him so he couldn’t fight back anymore?

“No,” she replied desperately. “Listen--”

“Yeah, Varian,  _ listen,” _ Andrew mocked. “You’re a naive little  _ brat _ who was easy to manipulate in prison, and you’re easy to manipulate now.”

Cassandra stepped forward, reaching out to him with pain clear on her face. Varian took another step back to stay out of her range, his heart racing in his chest. He turned his wide, frightened eyes to Cassandra’s face, silently begging for this all to be a lie.

Behind her, with practiced ease, Andrew lifted his hand, and snapped his fingers. “Get him.”

Kai and Clementine moved, and so did Varian. Andrew’s instruction had snapped whatever tether of desperation had been holding he and Cassandra together. With renewed adrenaline, Varian turned and sprinted in the direction of the village, still the only clear escape route. He could feel Kai and Clementine surge after him, could hear Cassandra cry out for him to stop,  _ wait, Varian don’t _ , but he didn’t slow in the slightest.

As he sprinted into the trees, the earthen rumble of black rocks sounded behind him. With a crazed glance over his shoulder, Varian saw a wall of them rise up between him and his pursuers, blocking the Saporian’s path. He could hear swords clash, presumably from Cassandra and Andrew engaging in combat, but he didn’t slow.

The trees flew by him in a blur as tears streaked down his face. He stumbled, struggling to keep balance with one arm out of commission, and just barely managed to catch himself before falling. 

_ A naive little brat, _ Andrew’s voice echoed.  _ Easy to manipulate in prison, and easy to manipulate now. _

He was so  _ stupid. _ He had wanted so desperately to get Cass back, to convince her to change her mind, that he had overlooked so many warning signs. Had he asked where they were going? Had he questioned where she was leading him? No. He’d followed because he wanted,  _ needed _ to trust her. Because it was Cass, and she had saved him from the vines and the Saporians, so surely she was going to be the friend and guardian he knew her to be. 

_ A giant circle. Another day and you’d be right back at that tree where you belong. _

Gasps echoed around him as he ran, interrupted by the occasional sob. He didn’t have the strength to hold them back. Where the hell was he going?  _ Away, _ but away wasn’t good enough. He was days from anywhere helpful, weeks from anywhere familiar. He had no plan, no food, no money. But he couldn’t just stand there and let them take him back. He couldn’t just give in. 

So he ran. And ran, and ran, until his lungs burned and his ribs ached and his exhausted body was barely running at all, just stumbling from tree to tree for support. 

His toe got a rock, and he tripped, so suddenly that it made him shout. He tumbled onto the forest floor, carpeted with pine needles, and rolled twice before coming to a stop on his side. 

With his instincts still screaming at him to run, Varian struggled onto his knees and looked around, intent on getting up.

He was kneeling in the middle of the lost village. Ancient stone foundations, covered in moss and ferns, lay peacefully where homes had once been, skeletons of a life long lost. Here among the bones of the past, Varian could not hear the sounds of swords clashing, or rocks rising, or Saporians yelling. He was totally alone.

Dropping back on his ankles, Varian’s shoulders fell. He gasped for breath, struggling to recover from his escape. The more breath he got back, the more his situation dawned on him.

He cried. He cried harder and harder the longer he sat there, sobbing openly into the big, empty forest. He wanted his dad. He wanted to go home. He wanted to feel safe again, to not be so utterly, completely alone, surrounded by wolves. 

Eventually, he ran out of steam. His lungs ached for air and his head throbbed from crying. He rubbed the back of his hand against his eyes to try and clear the tears away, sniffling where he knelt in the dirt. A great quiet was overtaking him now, like the calm that settled over the ocean after a storm. He had every reason to get up and keep running, but none of the strength needed to do it. Varian was finally, completely, utterly spent. 

If he had still been crying, he wouldn’t have heard it. As it were, in the silence of his heartbreak, Varian’s ear twitched at the sound of something rustling the pine needles not far to his right. He looked over, thinking distant thoughts of squirrels or chipmunks.

What he found was a vine, twisting slowly toward him.

His heart leapt back into his throat. Varian scrambled to get away from it, falling to the side and crawling backwards in a panic. As he watched, more vines slithered out from behind the stone ruins, all of them moving toward him at a horrifyingly steady pace. 

Varian backed up until his back hit one of the walls, cutting off his escape. With wide eyes, he scraped his heels into the ground to try and get traction, but his strength was gone, and he couldn’t seem to get himself up.

That’s when the gray girl stepped up onto the stone wall across from him. She smiled at him with that too-wide smile, that horrifying gleam in her eyes. She spread her hands in welcome as more and more vines appeared. To Varian’s paralyzing fear, he saw her shadow spread across the ground between them. It was not that of a little girl: it was a giant, hulking form, with rams horns on its head.

In a haunting voice, the girl lifted her chin, and spoke. 

“Hello, my little alchemist.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If an alchemist falls in a forest, an no one is around to hear him, did he make a sound?

All things considered, Varian was surprised that he got the sling off in one fluid motion. He was operating without thinking, all instinct and impulse, pulling his bad arm free and using it to leverage himself up the stone wall at his back. The wall was only waist-high, and he turned with every intention of vaulting over it. He planted his palms against the mossy stones, leaned his weight forward, lifted one leg to plant his foot, to launch off, to start running again--

A vine snared his lower right leg and yanked him back, hard. By some miracle, he avoided slamming his head against the stone wall as he fell, pulled backward toward the grey girl and her swarm of vines.

Varian hit the ground with a grunt and dug his fingers into the earth to try and stop from being pulled toward the demon. The vine around his leg flexed, there was a wet  _ crack _ , and he screamed.

The side of his lower leg lit up with agony, a bolt of white-hot pain that shot up to his hip and back down again. Even as he cried out in pain, the vine continued to drag him, stopping only when he was at the center of the clearing, curled on his side and clawing at the earth in a desperate, useless attempt at getting away. The vine did not let go.

“You’re a slippery little thing, aren’t you,” the demon said, her voice casual as she paced along the top of the wall. “We could have done such wonderful work together, if the Sundrop hadn’t ruined you.”

Varian gasped for breath, gulping down air like he was drowning, the pain pounding in his leg. He pushed onto his elbows to try and get up, only to have another vine wrap around his middle. In a panic, he dropped onto his bad shoulder, nearly blind to the pain, and grabbed at the vine that was slowly beginning to coil and tighten around his waist. 

“Let go of me,” he rasped, fear nearly strangling the words in his throat. “Let  _ go of me, _ you witch!”

The grey girl tsked, sitting down on the wall and crossing one leg over the other. “I’m a witch, am I?”

Varian lay shaking on the forest floor, prying desperately at the vine around his middle while trying to keep his throbbing leg as still as possible. “Y-you’re a demon,” he groaned through clenched teeth, “and I don’t care  _ what _ you do to me, I  _ will not _ help you!”

He expected her to drop her serene grin, but she didn’t. The grey girl--Zhan Tiri, Varian shuddered to think--only examined her gloved hand with mock interest.

“Do you know,” she asked, not even deigning to look at him as she spoke, “what this village used to be?”

Realizing the futility of struggling against the vines, Varian dropped his head to the ground, closing his eyes tight and focusing on breathing. This couldn’t be happening. After everything, she had gotten him again. He felt tears prick at the corners of his eyes.

“My dear little alchemist, it would serve you well to look at me when I speak to you,” Zhan Tiri said, only a slight edge of warning in her voice. Varian closed his eyes tighter, defiant, until something slithered against his throat. Before he could react beyond a flinch, a vine wrapped itself carefully around his neck. He gasped, the knife of fear in his chest twisting deeper. His eyes shot open as the vine moved against his jaw and the base of his skull, forcing him to turn and look at the demon. He grabbed at it desperately with both hands, but it may as well have been made of steel.

“Let’s try again,” she said, nodding as though she were granting him a kindness. “Does that clever little mind of yours know what this village used to be?”

When Varian didn’t answer immediately, the vine around his broken leg flexed, and he cried out in pain. “No,” he gagged, struggling to remain still. 

“No,” Zhan Tiri repeated, “of course not. Stories of my victories were erased along with my memory.”

Through watery eyes, Varian watched the demon lift a hand and snap. Another vine reached up and coiled around Varian’s chest, pinning his arms in place where he had them bent to grab at the tendril around his throat. He rasped a small sound of panic as the vines lifted him into a seated position. 

For a moment, he was face to face with Zhan Tiri, who sat on the ancient stone wall and grinned her too-wide grin at him. “Let me show you,” she said, her voice just a little too harsh, before hopping off the wall and strolling toward him. 

If he could have recoiled, he would have. As it were, with a vine around his neck and his arms pinned to his chest, Varian could only wince as the demon girl stepped up to him and cupped his bruised cheek with her too-small hand. A wave of disorienting magic rolled over him, the same kind of nausea he’d felt when he woke up from the vine-induced nightmare in the Great Tree. He closed his eyes tight, feeling as though the earth were rolling beneath them, tilting this way and that. He felt her fingers trail down to his chin before breaking contact. 

Warily, he opened his eyes to try and see what she was planning. Instead, he was looking at an active village.

Varian was seated in the center of a cluster of houses. Their structure and design was unfamiliar to him, antiquated in a way he didn’t recognize even from history books. The walls were hazy and unclear, built on top of the stone foundations that were a collection of rubble only seconds ago. Ghostly forms of people moved around him, blind to the battered boy bound in vines in the middle of their village.

The more he looked around, the clearer everything became. Certain colors to the villager’s clothing; the muffled sounds of speaking, as though it were coming through water; a child ran passed him, chasing a ball.

None of them had faces. They moved in a wistful, dream-like rhythm, like memories from long ago. 

A hand ran through his hair, and Varian drew in a sharp breath of surprise, still unable to flinch. The grey girl stood immediately behind him, playing with his hair like he was her pet. 

“A dear friend of mine once called this village home. He had a brilliant mind, always striving to invent things that would improve the lives of his people. He put his village before himself; he put his beloved Corona before all else. Do you know who he was?”

As she spoke, Varian’s eyes tracked the faceless ghosts, her words sending almost as many shivers down his spine as her constant, possessive fingers through his hair. “Demanitus,” he whispered, the vine just loose enough against his throat to allow him to speak. 

Zhan Tiri leaned close, her words right beside his ear now. “Demanitus,” she confirmed. “A hero to all. But when  _ I _ needed him most, in my hour of greatest need? He betrayed me. Left me to die in favor of a kingdom that didn’t even know his name.”

The demon stood upright, finally pacing away from Varian. She wandered through the ghosts for several paces before turning inhuman yellow eyes toward him. “So I punished him. I took away the thing he loved.”

As he watched, the ghostly buildings began to light up in green flames. The people, who had only seconds before been peacefully going through their daily routines, began to run and scream as fire consumed them faster than they could escape. Acrid smoke swirled around everything, and people and houses alike withered like paper, shrinking and blackening in the green flames, before Varian couldn’t stand it a moment longer and closed his eyes tight.

The warbled, distant sounds of people screaming died away. In a panic, Varian forced his eyes open and watched the smoke clear, a few stray tears escaping down his cheeks. Zhan Tiri was back at the wall she had appeared on, sitting down on the old stone foundation like she had every right to be there. 

“You have a little village that you love too, don’t you,” she asked.

Varian felt his stomach run cold. He stared at the demon with wide eyes, mind going momentarily blank with panic. Zhan Tiri’s smile widened.

“You try so hard to help the people there,” she mused, “just like he did. Such a clever little mind, wasted on ungrateful peasants.”

With a deep, comfortable sigh, the demon crossed one leg back over the other and leaned back on her right hand, lifting her eyes to the treetops high above. For a few beats, she sat peacefully, looking for all the world like she was savoring the moment. 

When she looked back down, it was with a different face entirely, one with features that pulled too wide, skin that stretched too tight, pupils narrowed to slits. “You will translate every scroll I put in front of you, or I will burn Old Corona to its foundations, and slaughter every breathing thing I find.”

Her threat was followed by immediate, ringing silence. Varian stared at her with open fear, his body shaking beneath the tight vines. He watched as her expression morphed back into something that vaguely resembled a young girl, a self-satisfied look of victory already crossing her face. 

But something occurred to him, in that moment. A realization that caught him so off guard it made his ears ring. Gradually, he felt himself stop shaking.

“No you won’t,” he whispered. Zhan Tiri’s expression remained unchanged for a moment longer before she seemed to process what he said. 

“Oh?” she inquired, amusement pulling that too-wide smile back onto her face. 

Varian struggled to keep his voice from shaking. The longer he sat with the realization, the more his confidence in it grew, and he felt a surge of defiance rise within him. “You can’t,” he rephrased, putting more strength and volume into his words, and this time, the demon’s smile faltered. A brief flash of anger appeared on her face. 

“You can’t,” Varian repeated, “because you’re- you’re not strong enough. If you were, you wouldn’t need Cassandra. You need the scrolls because... because you don’t have the same power you once did. Without me translating them, you’re nothing.”

For a horrible moment, the demon only stared at him, her expression every shade of frightening there was. Varian clenched his teeth in anticipation of more pain, but for whatever reason, the demon chose instead to stand from the wall. She stepped toward him at an agonizingly slow pace, building tension with each placement of her feet. Varian struggled to keep his breathing even, struggled to keep eye contact with her as she approached. His resolve was flagging with each step she took, panic and doubt taking over where certainty had just been. 

When she stopped in front of him, his breathing was fast and uneven. She leaned in until their noses were only a precious few inches apart. “Then perhaps there are more direct ways for me to make you cooperate.”

She stood upright, looking down at him with malice, and swept her hand out to the side in a quick, unhesitant gesture. Suddenly, the vines holding him yanked him forward, throwing him onto his back in the process. He cried out, his leg splitting with pain as he was dragged violently across the clearing. His shirt rode up, sticks and rocks scraping up the length of his back as he was raked over them.

Ahead, a large hollow yawned open in the roots of one of the bigger trees, like the maw of a giant beast. The vines that had been constricting him all seemed to come from this hollow, and it was where they were pulling him now, retreating into the tree with him in their grasp. 

Varian cried out in pain and panic, his sharp voice echoing off the trees and old stone foundations of the village that once was. In response, the vine around his throat tightened, and his voice was choked off, along with any hope he had of breathing.

He could do nothing. The vines dragged him closer and closer to the gaping mouth in the tree’s roots, a black hole that vanished into the earth below. His heart pounded in his ears, lungs burning with desperate need for air, static flooding his vision in only seconds with how fast his heart was beating, his leg singing in agony, he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t breathe,  _ fuck, he couldn’t breathe-- _

Suddenly, he wasn’t moving anymore. Suddenly, the vines around him loosened, spasming like snakes that had just been beheaded. Suddenly, Varian was able to draw a breath in. 

He gasped, coughing and hacking as he struggled to fill his lungs with oxygen. He rolled blindly onto his side, finally able to move his arms, finally able to yank the vine away from his throat. As he retched and rasped, his senses began to return to him.

Someone was yelling. 

_ Cassandra was yelling. _

Someone was grabbing at the loosened vines, pulling them off of him.

_ Cassandra was grabbing at the loosened vines, pulling them off of him. _

Varian forced his watering eyes open. He held his throat carefully, as if doing so would keep anyone or anything from strangling him again. With difficulty, he rolled his head to try and look back the way he’d come. Drag marks, in the dirt; black armored feet, standing between him and the demon; the point of a black sword, angled down but very much at the ready.

“-on’t let you do this,” Cassandra’s voice was saying, angry and determined. 

The demon responded, but her voice warbled for a moment, only clearing after Varian pulled in another lungful of air. “-letting your childish attachments get in the way of your destiny,” she was saying, as though she were scolding a child. “Do you not want to-“—her voice grew muffled again, and Varian curled inward, focusing instead on breathing. Slowly, his heart rate began to return to… not normal, it hadn’t been normal for what felt like days, but it was back to a manageable pace.

He didn’t know what to focus on. The pain in his leg had reached a terrible kind of constant, one that he was almost getting used to. His shoulder was also demanding his attention after the abuse he’d just put it through. But Cass was here, and Zhan Tiri just beyond her, and—

_ She’s working for the demon, _ he realized, and then tried to argue against it in the same instant, denial and hope still elbowing their way into his mind.  _ She doesn’t know who the demon is. _

“I don’t need anyone’s help to achieve my destiny,” Cassandra was saying. “Least of all his. You told me the Moonstone was enough!”

“You are facing off against an army, Cassandra. Rapunzel has more tools at her disposal than just the Sundrop—what makes you think she won’t use them to destroy you?”

“I’m stronger than her,” Cassandra all but yelled. “I can bring Corona crumbling down with the Moonstone alone.”

Numbly, Varian reached down and pulled off the last of the vines that hung around him, limp and lifeless. They had been severed halfway between himself and the tree, cut clean through by Cassandra’s blade.

_ She saved me again. _

“You’re a fool to leave a weapon behind because of your pride,” Zhan Tiri shot back, somewhere to the left of where she’d been, as if she were moving. 

“He’s not a weapon,” Cassandra growled. “He’s just a-“

“Just a child?” Zhan Tiri finished, phrasing it like it was absurd. “That has not stopped Rapunzel from using him. That will not stop her from using him again. Taking the boy for yourself will strip her of a powerful advantage and secure it for your own destiny!”

“I won’t,” Cassandra replied, her tone unflinching, inarguable. “And neither will the Saporians, and neither will  _ you.” _

With a great degree of effort, Varian lifted his head to try and see what was going on. Cassandra had moved further away, closing the gap between herself and the demon as they argued. It left Varian nearly forgotten near the dead vines, lying in a small wounded heap on the forest floor. He tried to roll onto his front, tried to move to get up, but every injury protested, and he had to settle for simply lying there, watching.

“Your weakness for old allies will be your downfall,” Zhan Tiri warned, her voice low and dangerous. “When have I led you astray? When has my guidance ever fallen short?”

Varian watched Cassandra’s hand tighten around the hilt of her sword. The demon didn’t give her an opportunity to think of a reply before speaking again. 

“You don’t want him to suffer,” Zhan Tiri said. “And he won’t. Why do you think I had him fast asleep like that? He was happy, at home with his father. There’s no need to cause him harm in order to get what you want from him.”

Cassandra remained quiet. Varian shifted, reaching a hand out and pawing at the ground as if doing so would get her attention. “Cass,” he rasped, pleading, his voice crushed. 

She didn’t turn to look at him, but he watched her shoulders rise with tension. She lifted her head to look Zhan Tiri right in the eye. “You should’ve thought of that before you recruited the Saporians.”

The demon’s expression hardened. “So to spare him more harm, you’ll leave him to die alone in the woods?”

This seemed to hit on an uncomfortable truth, so much so that even Varian felt the way that Cassandra winced. A spark of desperate panic lit up inside of him at the thought of being left here in this state. Which was the worse option? Being taken prisoner, or being left to die?

“I’ll bring him to the nearests village, and leave him,” Cassandra declared, sounding as though she were trying to convince herself of this plan. 

Across from her, Zhan Tiri’s expression darkened even further, a barely-contained rage visible just below the surface. Her eyes flickered to Varian, before she straightened her posture and lifted her chin.

“I cannot allow you to walk a weapon right into the hands of the enemy,” Zhan Tiri said, her voice suddenly lofty, authoritative. “Perhaps, the best solution is for neither the Sundrop  _ nor _ the Moonstone to have him.”

Through his haze, Varian’s frown deepened with confusion. Though he could not see her face, Cassandra seemed to hesitate as well. The demon lifted an open palm toward the sky, and her intention became immediately clear.

Behind her, a coiled mass of vines as thick as a tree lifted a boulder up from the hard-packed earth, hoisting it into the air as though it weighed nothing. When it was several yards above the grey girl, she turned her sharp eyes to Varian, and threw her arm forward in an arc.

The roots mimicked her action, and flung the boulder directly at him.

The world went silent as Varian watched the massive stone sail through the air. Hundreds of conflicting instincts warred within him for fractions of a second, offered and denied faster than he could recognize them. He could not move--it was coming too fast--he was going to die-- _ please let it be quick-- _

Varian curled inward, bracing for the last horrifying moment of his life.

_ “No!”  _ Cassandra screamed. There was a shock of black and blue rising skyward before him, a flash of brilliant golden light surrounding him, the sound of an exploding rock that was ear-splitting in one instant, and muffled in the next. Varian stayed curled in a tight ball, eyes squeezed shut, fast breaths going no deeper than his throat--

But the boulder did not come down. 

The world around him was suddenly, inexplicably warm. It was quiet, too, and glowing in a rich golden light. Numb, Varian slowly opened his eyes to find not the forest, not the ruins of the old village, but…

Hair. Brilliant, gold, glowing hair.

In the stillness of the golden nest that surrounded him, Varian lifted eyes eyes and found Rapunzel. She was curled over him protectively, her hair alight with magic and surrounding them in a protective shield. Her big green eyes looked back at him with misty tears of relief on her lashes. Her smile was the most radiant thing he had ever seen. 

“Rapunzel,” Varian whispered in disbelief. In the quiet of the magical shield, he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t dead. 

“Varian,” she replied, her voice strong with emotion. “It’s okay. We’ve got you.”

She smiled at him, so reassuring and sincere that he smiled back without thinking of it, his face a bruised and exhausted comparison. He only realized that tears had welled up once they broke free and trailed down his cheeks. 

His leg and shoulder still throbbed. His breaths still wheezed gently through his bruised throat. Thirst, hunger, and exhaustion all wore at him with each second. He wasn’t dead.

He was saved.

“We’ve got you,” Rapunzel repeated. “I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you also think I was going to be able to get this scene done in one chapter? Because I, an idiot, thought so. Oh well. More chapters for people who like chapters. Thank you for sticking it out with me this far!


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I really missed the opportunity to do cute little Adventure Zone-esque chapter summaries with this fic. I guess it's a good thing that there is a potential sequel looming on the horizon? Would anyone be interested in that? I mean, we're all basically stuck at home right now anyway, and I have a post-TTS concept that would follow this story nicely. 
> 
> In the meantime, the previous chapter got fanart?! My dudes?? My dudes go check it out?? https://wallywestfest.tumblr.com/post/612419864190156800/a-bit-of-quick-fanart-for-the-fantastic-like-blood
> 
> Thank you Dotty.d.art on Instagram/Wallywestfest on tumblr! I hope you don't mind me putting you on blast, but I can't NOT share it.
> 
> Speaking of art, to commemorate getting to the "comfort" part of the hurt/comfort genre, I added a piece of my own to the end of this chapter! TW for like, illustrated injuries. Nothing graphic, just a heads up! 
> 
> There's one more chapter left after this. Thank you everyone for your support and interest, it's been so encouraging and awesome to read all your great feedback!
> 
> Anyway. Whump.

Cassandra couldn’t move.

Rarely was she caught so off guard as she was in that moment, where the surprise numbed the world around her, limited her field of vision, silenced her mind. One moment, a boulder the size of a carriage was flying through the air, about to crush Varian. She had lifted her arm, had drawn several huge black spikes from the earth to block it’s path. The boulder had smashed against them, breaking into big chunks that were trapped between the spikes, and smaller rocks that flew like shrapnel toward their target.

And then a flash of gold, a brilliant blur of light streaking down from above, and a shield curled protectively around the alchemist, deflecting the smaller offshoots from the destroyed boulder.

Cassandra stared at the dome of blond, glowing hair, and couldn’t move.

Her heart was still pounding with the abrupt fear of nearly losing Varian, but her mind was blank. For the precious few seconds that it took for the shield of hair to unravel and reveal the newcomer, Cassandra could only stare.

When the dome parted, it was around Rapunzel, rising to her full height and turning to face her. Haloed in fading gold light, the princess wore an expression of righteous, dawning fury. 

“Cassandra,” she said, her voice low with disbelief and anger, “how could you?”

Behind her, Varian used his good arm to push himself into a seated position. Cassandra snapped her gaze to him, needing to see him alive to get over the shock of almost losing him, but he wasn’t returning her look. He was gazing up at Rapunzel, fresh tears trailing over the cuts and bruises on his face, relief so potent on his face that it made Cassandra take a step back.

“How could you do this to him,” Rapunzel clarified, her hands curling into tight fists, her glare deepening. 

It snapped Cassandra out of her surprised stupor. Anger filled the voids and crevices that fear had carved into her chest, flooding back into her like a storm surge. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she snapped, leveling a venomous glare back at Rapunzel. “I didn’t hurt him.”

Rapunzel stepped forward, planting her feet between Cassandra and Varian, an unmovable, unflinching barrier. The long train of her hair was still circled around him like a nest. At the sight, the anger in Cassandra’s chest took shape, twisting into something ugly and barbed. Something jealous.

_She_ had kept Varian safe these last few days. She had rescued him from that nightmare, had kept him out of Andrew’s hands, had foraged for food for him, had taken watch while he slept. _She_ was the one who had just stood up to her advisor, had been prepared to let him go even if it meant losing a sharp advantage over her enemies. And now here was Rapunzel, showing up far too late and laying claim to the title of savior, as if she had done anything to earn it.

Cassandra’s lip curled into a snarl. “You think you can just drop in and play the hero? If you gave half the shit about your friends that you claim you do, he wouldn’t have been taken in the first place!”

Rapunzel set her jaw. “You accuse _me_ of not keeping him safe, when I show up and find him like this?”

She swept her arm to the side, pushing back the curtain of her hair. Behind her, Varian looked from Rapunzel to Cassandra. He looked so miserable, so exhausted, that Cassandra couldn’t hold his gaze for more than a brief glance.

“You haven’t been here! I’m the only reason he isn’t being tortured in a cell right now!”

“How can I believe that,” Rapunzel cut back, a touch of desperation pulling at her words, “when you’re working with that demon?”

Cassandra stepped forward, denial burning at the tip of her tongue, when the corner of her eye snagged on Varian again. 

_Varian, sitting in front of her in that pit, dead vines littered around them. He was disoriented from the nightmare, holding his bad arm against his side, face tight with pain. “Do you know who she is,” he asked. “_ What _she is?”_

“She’s manipulating you, like she’s always done,” the ghost girl said somewhere behind her, shaking Cassandra from the memory. Hidden behind Rapunzel, Varian was watching her now, his eyes pleading, heartbroken.

Cassandra was hesitating, torn between Varian’s gaze and the alternative explanation that the ghost girl was offering her. _Manipulating._ Rapunzel had always had a way of spinning things to fit her point of view. How was this any different?

The implication--that the ghost girl was a demon--would mean that Cassandra was being led astray. That she was not in control. And after everything she had worked to achieve, for Rapunzel to imply that it was all for nothing, that Cassandra was no closer to her destiny than when she’d grabbed the moonstone--

Rapunzel stepped forward, and Cassandra’s attention snapped toward her. “How can you blindly accept what that monster says? If you’re not the one who hurt Varian, Cass, then that _thing_ behind you is. And you’ve let it happen!”

The surprise at Rapunzel’s anger was only a brief flash, eclipsed by the rage at the accusation. “All I’ve done is protect him,” Cassandra bit back, “which you can’t seem to do, given that he was taken right out from under your nose!”

“You’re blaming me for your “advisor’s” schemes now?” Rapunzel asked, flexing her fingers around the word as if it were a joke. She swept her arm back to indicate Varian. “Look at him! If you’ve been protecting him this whole time, why is he so hurt?”

Cassandra began to circle, never taking her eyes off of Rapunzel, anger narrowing her field of vision. “Typical Rapunzel,” she spat, “naive to a fault and blind to the way the real world works. Let me ask you something, _princess,_ what makes you fit to lead a kingdom if you can’t even look out for your friends?”

“Do _not_ turn this back on me, Cassandra,” Rapunzel warned. “You’re the one being played like a puppet by Zhan Tiri.”

A dead, still silence fell over the clearing. Cassandra blinked, her head snapping back a fraction as she stopped mid-pace. For a moment, she simply stared at her counterpart, processing the implication.

Then, an ugly burst of laughter escaped her chest. “That’s… That’s your move? To evoke a long-dead boogeyman, to try and throw me off?”

Rapunzel lifted her chin, shoulders rising with frustration. “Cass, listen-”

“No, _you_ listen. Make no mistake, I am your enemy, but comparing me to a fictional demon? How desperate are you to hold onto the past?”

Anger, hot and righteous, flared across Rapunzel’s face. Before she could respond, another voice cut in.

Small, weak, and raspy, Varian’s voice was a jarring shift in energy from the argument that was unfolding. Nonetheless, when he spoke, both women stopped short, their full attention pivoting to him. “I tried to tell you,” he said quietly, eyes fixed solely on Cassandra. “Cass… _please_ listen.”

He sounded so resigned. So deeply exhausted, a kind of sadness that Cassandra had seen only brief hints of over the last few days. Where Rapunzel was burning bright with protective anger, Varian’s walls--his judgements--were gone. He looked at her as if… as if she were lost.

Cassandra hesitated. Holding Varian’s gaze, she felt some of her self-righteous anger ebb, replaced by guilt. It was the same guilt that had driven her away from the Saporians, leaving them trapped in black rock cages rather than finishing the job. The same guilt that powered her through the forest as she’d run after Varian, the same guilt that had leapt into her throat alongside fear when she heard his distant scream of pain echo through the trees.

It had been a long few days. Spending them with Varian, Cassandra had felt more like a person--more like herself--than she had in the months since she’d taken the Moonstone. 

_Bad guys never think they’re the bad guys._

Movement above caught her eye, and she took a half-step back, walls slamming up. In a larger clearing maybe a hundred yards away, just outside of the old stone foundations, a hot air balloon descended toward the ground. Panicked thoughts of the Saporians flickered across her mind, there and dismissed in a breath. This balloon was a soft yellow, painted with the crest of Corona on the side like a giant paper lantern. It had an engine affixed to the side that had the tell-tale design of one of Varian’s inventions. And inside of it, even from this distance, Cassandra could recognize Eugene and Lance.

She was out of time. 

Before the balloon even landed, Eugene had vaulted over the side. He ran through the trees to where Rapunzel stood, sliding to a stop on his knees beside Varian, who floundered with renewed relief before being pulled into a careful, desperate hug. 

“Hey, kid,” Cassandra heard, as she watched the man carefully lean back and look Varian over with an increasingly-pained expression on his face. When he lifted his eyes to look at her, his glare rivaled Rapunzel’s.

He didn’t need to say anything for the accusation to be there. He looked at her as if she had personally beaten Varian into the ground.

Behind her, the ghost girl took a deep, audible breath. “Nevermind this,” she said, dismissive and haughty. “There will be recourse in the future.”

Cassandra stood there, violently oscillating between anger and heartbreak, watching as Lance joined the trio across from her. Varian turned that same look of relief and joy his way, and Cassandra couldn’t help but think of the way he’d flinched away from her in that pit when she’d tried to help with his shoulder. How he’d been wary of her at every step, even when he’d tried to argue with her about how they were still friends. 

“There he is,” Lance heaved, taking Eugene’s place beside Varian as the other man stood and stepped up next to Rapunzel. The both of them were squaring off against her, Cassandra realized, and Varian was blocked from her sight, safe in Lance’s huge arms.

“Cassandra,” the ghost girl said, an edge of warning to her voice. “Come. The battle is lost.”

Behind her, the sound of ripping disrupted the tension in the air. Cassandra turned to find the ghost girl standing before a portal, floating in mid-air as though she had cut it open in the fabric of space. 

The ghost girl saw the hesitation on Cassandra’s face. “Unless of course,” she mused, “you’d like to turn yourself in?”

Cassandra set her jaw, and clenched her fists. Turning one last time, she met Rapunzel’s look with a venomous glare, before cutting her gaze one last time toward Varian.

To her surprise, he had leaned out of Lance’s arms to see her. Between Eugene and Rapunzel, Varian looked as heartbroken as she felt. Almost imperceptibly--did she imagine it?--he shook his head, pleading for her not to go.

Cassandra averted her eyes. Before she could change her mind, she turned away. A storm of emotions raged inside her chest, confusion and anger and guilt all battling for her full attention.

She stepped into the portal.

-

The first thing that Rapunzel noticed after the portal closed was the silence, and the only reason she noticed it was because after several seconds of dead air, the sounds of birds chirping and bugs buzzing began to pick back up. She hadn’t realized it was absent until she heard it again. With the demon gone from the area, nature began to reassert itself.

The second thing she noticed was the drag marks in the earth, which needed no explanation once she turned and got a better look at Varian.

He was leaning against Lance’s chest, the heel of his good hand pressed against his eye as if he were trying to stop himself from crying. “I couldn’t,” he whispered. “I couldn’t convince her. I really tried. I’m so sorry.”

Eugene crouched down, muttering soft nothings to reassure him. We know you did, buddy, it’s not your fault, you have nothing to be sorry about. Rapunzel listened to it as though the exchange was happening in another room. Her focus was on his leg, which he had extended outward. Varian was shifting around without moving it, a conscious effort to avoid more pain. Rapunzel knelt beside it and let her hands hover over it briefly. 

“Varian,” she said softly, and two sets of eyes--Lance’s and Eugene’s--turned toward her. She looked up at the young alchemist and felt all of her emotions surge forward at once, tamped down only by sheer force of will. He was still trying to wipe away his tears, his gaze downcast, avoiding her. 

“Hey,” she implored, reaching in front of Eugene and gently cupping the side of Varian’s face. He kept his eyes turned downward, but he leaned into her hand, sniffling. “You’ve been through a lot. Let’s focus on getting you home for right now, okay? We have all the time we need to talk about what happened. Right now, just let us take care of you.”

Varian hesitated, and then lifted his gaze to meet her’s. She used the pad of her thumb to wipe away a tear as it rolled over the bruise on his cheek.

“She didn’t hurt me,” he whispered, as though it were deathly important that Rapunzel understood that.

Her gaze saddened. “I believe you,” she replied. 

This seemed like enough for Varian, even if only for the moment. He lifted his chin as Rapunzel’s hand dropped away. So much remained unsaid, so much emotion ignored in favor of focusing on the now. They all felt it, the churning waves just beneath their feet, a situation with so much emotional momentum ending so abruptly. Rapunzel knew it wouldn’t stay away for long. But in the moment, she had something actionable that needed her attention, and she clung to it like a life preserver.

“Can you walk on this,” she offered, looking once again at Varian’s leg. He took a careful breath and shook his head. 

“A splint, then,” Eugene said, placing a supportive hand on Rapunzel’s shoulder. “Good thing about forests? Plenty of branches to make splints. I’ll go find some.”

“Hey kid,” Lance said, curling his arm carefully around Varian in a sort of side-hug. “Do you want the good news, or the great news? Because I’ve got both for you.”

Rapunzel stood and turned toward the air balloon, to retrieve the first aid kit. As she stepped away, she heard a weak, wet laugh bubble out of Varian’s chest. 

“I could use either,” he replied. 

“Well the good news is, there’s a village not too far from here that has an inn with your name on it. The _great_ news is that said inn has the best lentil stew in all the seven kingdoms.”

“Oh,” Varian said softly, a realization dawning on him, “food sounds _so_ good right now.”

Rapunzel continued toward the balloon. Somewhere to her right, she could hear Eugene chime in as he poked around for branches. Lance said something back, and Varian laughed, a little more genuine than before.

There was too much to unpack. But for the moment--just for now--she let herself feel the relief that she’d been longing for over the last few days. They’d found him. Varian was safe.

She let herself smile.

-

Eugene Fitzherbert was a reliable, honest, and compassionate man.

Whether or not all of these things were true was neither here nor there; the important thing was that he had a “fake it ‘til you make it” approach to life, and where once he had dreamed of wealth and power and fame, he was now aiming for higher ideals, chief among them the aforementioned three traits.

(He had been told they were the markers of noble men.)

(Rapunzel had told him this.)

But if ever there was an opportunity to put all three of those traits to the test, this was it. In the basket of the balloon, there was scarcely any room to spread out and relax, but they had all done what they could to create a spot for Varian. The teenager was leaned against a burlap sack full of wool that they hadn’t taken the time to remove when they’d pulled the balloon from the barn in Old Corona. At any rate, it had made a great pillow to rest against on the trip to find Varian, and it was serving that role brilliantly now.

After carefully removing his boot, Rapunzel had folded her black cloak, and they’d rolled it around his leg with two branches on either side to make a splint. It was propped up on one of the few blankets they had. 

But it wasn’t the broken leg, or the splint around his arm, or even the bruising on Varian’s face that had given Eugene pause. It was the bruising on his neck, a vicious purple that stained his skin in a line around his throat. Strangled. Eugene had been unfortunate enough to see more than a few criminals hanged in his days as a thief, and it was all he could think about as his gaze kept wandering to the injury.

“So, kid,” he said, forcing his eyes back up to Varian’s face for the upteenth time. It went unnoticed--Varian was looking dejectedly off to the side, the shadows around his eyes revealing how exhausted he was. “You’ve got at least two solid weeks of being spoiled rotten ahead of you. What are you going to eat first? I would recommend the eclairs at the castle, they’re _superb.”_

Eugene was seated beside the young alchemist, his legs crossed. He had taken up first watch, an unspoken agreement between Lance, Rapunzel, and himself that demanded at least one of them be comforting Varian at all times. Rapunzel was steering; Lance was keeping lookout. With their attention elsewhere, it was about as private as they were going to get. 

“I can’t imagine they’d be in great shape by the time they got to Old Corona,” Varian said quietly, looking toward Eugene and offering him a weak, unconvincing smile. 

“Old Coro- Oh, well actually, we were thinking the best place for you to be would be the castle’s infirmary. I mean, you’re in pretty rough shape, no offense, and uh… Hey, who doesn’t want a great big overstuffed bed and an endless line of servants bringing them whatever they want? I’m talking peeled, hand-fed grapes at midnight, Goggles. Divine.”

Eugene emphasized his fantasy with a swish of a hand, but Varian was studying him closely now, and didn’t seem to notice. After a beat, his expression shifted to mild panic.

“You think they’ll come after me again,” he asked quietly, his eyebrows pulling up in worry. 

Quick to try and placate the panic on his face, Eugene lifted both of his hands in a soothing gesture. “No, what? No, we just… I mean, we didn’t find the Saporians, exactly, but that doesn’t… I mean, the important thing is that you’re safe, so--”

“I don’t-... But-…” Varian muttered, his eyes drifting down and away, looking at something a thousand miles off. His breathing was picking up speed, quiet little hiccups of panic. 

“Oh, hey, I’m sorry Varian, I didn’t mean to-- Blondie, help?”

Rapunzel--who had clearly been listening to the exchange, even with her back to them--turned away from the valves and gears and stepped forward, taking a knee on Varian’s other side. She leaned in, a soothing elegance in her movements, and carefully cupped Varian’s face, guiding his focus up to her. 

“Hey,” she said gently, “look at me. _No one_ is going to take you anywhere you don’t want to go. Okay?”

Varian forced himself to look at her, his eyes somehow even bigger than usual. When he didn’t say anything, and his breathing remained quick, Rapunzel settled onto both knees beside him and scooted closer.

“We were all scared when we found out you’d been taken,” she said softly. “We came after you as fast as we could, and now that we have you back, safe and sound, we just… _I_ need to know that you’ll be safe and looked after, at least for a while. I know you probably want to be home with your father, in your own bed, but… Will you please humor me?”

Rapunzel smiled at him warmly, a sad pull to her eyebrows. “We can pick up your dad on the way,” she offered. 

Varian’s breathing had begun to even out. Eugene had no doubt that whatever he’d been through had been rough, and it seemed like the kid was only just then realizing that it must’ve been frightening for his friends too.

“Okay,” Varian answered quietly. Rapunzel’s smile warmed, so much so that Varian even smiled back. She brushed some of his fringe aside, tucking it carefully behind his ear. 

“Thank you,” she replied, genuine and relieved. “And don’t you worry, Varian. _No one_ is going to hurt you so long as we’re around.”

“That’s right,” Lance chimed in, turning to face them. “Consider us your personal security detail.”

Eugene reached forward and took hold of Varian’s good hand, giving his cold, dirty fingers a reassuring squeeze. “Now then. Let’s get to that inn, and get some food in you, huh? What do you say?

To his pleasant surprise, Varian squeezed his hand back. Imbued with confidence after Rapunzel’s comforting words, he turned a genuine smile up toward Eugene. “Only if you’re the one feeding me grapes.”

“Hey,” Eugene laughed, “I don’t recall agreeing to-”

“Oh, I think we can put him to work,” Rapunzel agreed on his behalf. 

“And, uh, a bath,” Varian tacked on, looking abruptly embarrassed. “Which I do _not_ need help with.”

“Really? Even with a broken leg?” Lance planted his hands on his hips. “I bet we can recruit some beautiful tavern maidens to help you--”

_“No thank you,”_ Varian shot back quickly, a blush warming up his face. 

After everything, it felt good to laugh.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who has two thumbs and finished this stupid thing? This guuyyyyyy.
> 
> (Notes regarding the sequel can be found at the bottom!)

It had been a long time since Quirin had read his son to sleep. So long, in fact, that the last book he’d read him had pictures of ducklings in it, which Varian had pointed at with all his endless questions. Once he had learned to read on his own, Quirin had become the audience, his son’s small voice guiding him from page to page without any need of assistance. 

So it was strange, to find himself once more with his son leaning up against his side while Quirin read to him. It was a Flynn Rider book, and clearly one that was further into the series than Quirin knew, because there was a lot of context that went right over his head. He’d only had a short amount of time to gather things for an extended stay at the castle; he hadn’t been examining titles too closely.

Presently, Flynn Rider was climbing up a slick cliff face behind a waterfall in an attempt at breaching a fortress full of explosives, for an overly-elaborate heist plot. Quirin was paying no more attention than Varian, who had drifted to sleep about twenty minutes ago, but he kept reading. The steady rumble of his voice seemed to keep Varian calm, even in sleep.

After a time, Quirin reached the end of the chapter and stared at the blank half-page beneath it. Silence, warm and safe, enveloped them. He turned his eyes downward, lingering on where Varian’s leg was propped up on a pillow, freshly cast in plaster. At his son’s side, Ruddigar was curled in a loose ball, one paw wrapped around Varian’s little finger.

“Quirin,” a voice prompted softly from across the room. He looked up to find Rapunzel standing at the door, leaning into the room. She offered him a tired smile, and he returned it with a nod. After a moment of hesitation, she stepped through the threshold, but did not approach the bed. 

“How is he,” she asked softly, lingering near the door as if her presence was an intrusion.

Quirin took a deep, slow breath. “Sleeping,” he said quietly, to which the princess smiled and nodded. Her expression remained tight with concern, and Quirin did not see the point in trying to quell it. Varian’s injuries would heal. With time, and support, his confidence would return. But there was another wound left by what had happened, something shared between everyone who cared for the boy. Once someone realizes how vulnerable a loved one is--how temporary--it’s impossible to unsee. 

A silence passed between them, in which Quirin realized he should leave his son to sleep in peace and quiet. In the following breath, he realized that he did not know how to extract himself from the bed without waking Varian, and so he sat there in increasing uncertainty while the princess looked on. 

“He certainly knows how to take care of himself,” Rapunzel offered. “Defying Zhan Tiri, escaping from the Great Tree, holding his own against Cassandra… I know he’ll pull through.”

Her words were a kindness, a testament to the unflinching optimism that her people revered her for. Quirin watched the gentle rise and fall of his son’s chest for a moment more before speaking.

“His mother,” he said quietly, as though revealing a dear secret. He spoke slowly, deliberately: this was a truth more holy than any he had ever known. “My wife was the strongest person I have ever met. And Varian…” Quirin carefully adjusted the arm he had wrapped around him, holding him against his side. “Varian is every bit her son.”

He did not look up at Rapunzel, but he felt her warm smile radiating off of her. There was a pause, a moment where Quirin let himself sit in his confession and really feel the truth of it. He could see her in everything Varian did, every stubborn deed and well-intentioned mistake and dutiful solution. Quirin had always had faith in his wife to pull through, and that faith now rested in his son.

The emotion of it all hit him suddenly, and he snapped out of it before it could overwhelm him. He placed a kiss on the top of Varian’s head, and then gently removed himself, easing Varian back onto the warm pillows in his place. Standing beside the bed, Quirin lingered only long enough to pull the blankets up, before turning and following the princess out of the room.

The door closed softly. In the quiet of the room, Varian opened his eyes and gazed up at the canopy above. Ruddigar nuzzled his hand. 

This was not the first time that Varian had faked falling asleep in the days following his rescue. At first, it hadn’t been necessary to pretend: he’d been so thoroughly exhausted that it was a chore for his father to wake him up even to eat. But around the fifth day, when his health leveled out and the monotony of bed rest sunk in, Varian began to notice that the only way he could really get alone time was if he was unconscious. Or at least, pretending to be.

It’s not that he wasn’t grateful for the company. To have so many friends and loved ones looking out for him, caring for him, expressing such genuine relief that he was okay, that he was home--it was difficult for him to wrap his head around, but absolutely wonderful. Playing games of cards with Lance, Angry and Catalina; Rapunzel teaching him how to knit while telling him elaborate stories of their journey to the Dark Kingdom; Eugene sneaking him pints of ale and sweets from the kitchen. Each was a gesture of love that he’d never known before in his life, and it was overwhelming. 

Because he had never had this much support before. Because he had done terrible things to these people, and he wasn’t certain he deserved their forgiveness. Because Cassandra’s unwillingness to hear reason was a mirror of painfully recent memories, things that he himself had said and done. Just underneath all of the comfort and relief and gratitude for being rescued, Varian could feel the cold waters of guilt and doubt lapping at his feet. 

It was like a spotlight had turned on him out of nowhere. The attention was as wonderful as it was horrifying.

With great care, Varian pushed himself into a seated position on the bed. He massaged Ruddigar’s ears thoughtlessly and looked out over the dark room, sighing with relief at how empty it was. Guilt aside, Varian simply wasn’t used to so much company. He had always been more comfortable on his own, had always been better at problem solving when there was no one around to distract him. 

On the bedside table, a glint caught his eye. His goggles sat next to the extinguished candle, their cracked lenses reflecting fragments of moonlight back at him. The frame was crunched inward and the brass plating was scraped up. 

For a moment, Varian regarded them with sad fatigue. He had been relieved that they weren’t lost entirely, but their condition hurt more than any injury he had sustained. They were, after all, his mother’s, gifted to him when she first got sick. She had shown him the wonders of alchemy; she had encouraged his experiments and tests. And to keep him safe, she’d given him her goggles, which he had kept all these years and put to thorough good use.

They could be repaired, he knew. They were no less representative of his mother if they had new lenses in them. It still hurt.

_ My wife was the strongest person I’ve ever met, _ his father’s words echoed. Varian took a slow, deep breath and reached to pick them up, turning them over in his hands. 

“You’re right, dad,” he whispered into the darkness. He turned the goggles over and gently smoothed his thumb over the cracked lens. “And mom wouldn’t just lie around and play the victim, would she?”

-

The thing about a broken leg was that it really came down to which bone was broken. In Varian’s case, it was the fibula, which meant that he’d be up and walking much sooner than if it had been his tibia or, god forbid, his femur. 

This was not explained to him by the infirmary’s physician. In fact, the old man had insisted that Varian stay off of it for an absurd number of weeks, which he had no intention of committing to when he knew full well that you could technically walk with a broken fibula. A few weeks of bed rest, sure, but by then Varian would have invented some sort of boot or walking cast that would let him get back to his life. He didn’t need some grey-bearded old man to dictate to him when he could and could not walk.

“Ruddigar, stop it, you’re going to get me caught,” Varian warned quietly. The raccoon hopped down from the suit of armor he’d climbed onto and sheepishly trotted along after the alchemist, who was gradually making his way through the moonlit hall toward the library.

The real burden wasn’t the broken leg, or the aches and pains all over his body, or even his bruised throat. No, the  _ real _ burden was the wretched crutch he was using, and how painful it was to lean his weight on it while it was wedged into his armpit. 

But it was too late to turn back. He was closer to new reading material than he had been when he got the idea to sneak out earlier, and it would be a waste of energy if he gave up now. Not to mention, if he got caught after already deciding to turn around, then he’d never get a second chance. Not with how overprotective everyone had been acting.

Around another corner, the tall double doors to the library came into view. Varian felt a surge of renewed purpose, and he adjusted the crutch in order to keep going. Ruddigar chirped happily in the darkness. 

“-is what I’m saying, that cashews are better than peanuts,” a voice said, behind him and down the hallway. Pete and Stan, headed his way on one of their nightly rounds. Varian sucked in a quick, startled breath and hobbled faster.

“And I’m saying that your system of categorizing nuts is inherently classist,” Stan replied. “Not everyone can afford cashews.”

“That doesn’t make them worse than peanuts,” Pete replied primly. With his left arm still in a sling, Varian let go of his crutch, holding it against his side with his arm, and grabbed the handle to the library door. He opened it just wide enough to slip inside, Ruddigar bolting in after him. 

“No, it makes them a rich man’s nut--” Stan’s voice was cut off as Varian closed the door behind him. He stood there, stiff as a statue, until the light of their patrol lantern passed by under the door. Only then did he let go of the handle and exhale carefully.

At his back, the library was as large as it was dark and silent. Moonlight filtered in at an angle from the huge windows, columns of pale light that cast large rectangles over the parquet floor. The walls were lined with shelves all the way up to the ceiling, rolling ladders on both the main floor and the balcony above. To his right, a table offered him an unlit candle dish, but he drew instead on a small alchemical vial that he’d had tucked into his tunic. With a quick shake, warm golden light enveloped him. 

Hopefully, the books he needed were on the first level. The thought of making his way up the twisting spiral staircase to the balcony above was unappealing, to say the least. 

He began his search with a sense of urgency. Even though he had left a note on his pillow, it was only a matter of time before someone came storming in to drag him back to bed, and he wanted as much time as possible to find what he needed before that happened.

Anything on Zhan Tiri. Anything about the Moonstone. Anything about the Separatists of Saporia, or magics of old, or hell, even a book titled “How To Convince Old Friends That The Villain Thing Really Doesn’t Suit Them” would be welcome, if not entirely self-indulgent. 

The good thing about being stuck in the castle was that it had the largest collection of books on these topics, and soon Varian had a small stack growing on the table by the door. Ruddigar explored for a bit before eventually curling up on the table next to the books, settling down once Varian took a seat to begin reading. 

He was about half-way into the third book, flipping past symbols and crests and cryptic writings, when he heard someone approaching in the hallway outside. The doors to the library flew open; Varian did not look up.

“Oh my  _ god _ , kid, you have  _ got _ to leave more than a one-word note,” Eugene heaved, relief packed into his voice when he rounded on the table and spotted him. “Just saying ‘library’ doesn’t do anything to keep me from freaking out!”

“I went to the library,” Varian explained, not looking up from an old iteration of the Saporian crest. 

“Yes, I can see that. Believe me, no one likes a smartass.” Eugene crossed to him, his shoulders still hiked up with tension. “What on earth were you thinking? It’s the middle of the night!”

“I was thinking I wanted to go to the library.”

“Oh, you  _ little--” _ Eugene stopped himself, forcing a deep breath into his lungs and back out slowly. “Look, Varian, I know you’re bored, but you scared me half to death. It’s past midnight!”

Finally, Varian looked up from the book. Eugene was in a simple white tunic and linen pants, his hair disrupted not from sleep but from him pulling at it in a fit of stress. Guilt wedged between Varian’s ribs. Even if he had known exactly what he’d been doing when he had decided to sneak to the library, it was one thing to think about his actions in the abstract, and another thing entirely to see someone react to them in person.

“I can’t just lie around and do nothing,” he explained, his voice only slightly more defensive than he’d intended it to sound. “The scrolls Zhan Tiri wanted me to translate were for weapons, Eugene, magic that would make her impossibly powerful. We need to try and get out ahead of it in case she finds another way to get what she wants.”

“And we will,” Eugene replied, his frustration draining out of him with each passing second, replaced by fatigue. He stepped forward and perched on the edge of the table, idly petting Ruddigar as he did so. “We’ll find a way to defeat her. We already know it can be done, since Demanitus locked her away once before. But we don’t need to figure it out in the dead of night on a Tuesday, do we?”

“For someone who’s so bothered by the hour,” Varian replied dryly, “you’re awfully awake yourself.”

“Yeah, well, some skin care routines require dedicated second applications, and let’s be honest,  _ this--” _ he gestured to his own face, “--is more than worth it.”

When Varian only stared at him flatly, Eugene’s shoulders slumped. His attempt at lofty humor had not pulled the weight out of the conversation. “Alright, fine. I wanted to check on you, okay? I figured I’d just take a peek, and you weren’t there, and I freaked out. You’re lucky I didn’t wake up the entire palace guard.”

Varian winced at the thought. “You wanted to check on me in the dead of night on a Tuesday?”

“I had a-- don’t turn this around on me,” Eugene warned. Sensing a shift in mood, Ruddigar sat up on his hind paws and titled his head, looking at Eugene curiously. Varian, who had learned how to read Ruddigar’s body language a long time ago, mimicked the head tilt. 

“You had a what,” Varian prompted. Eugene scoffed and crossed his arms over his chest, but the defensive posturing didn’t hold up long. Whatever cool facade he typically kept up during daylight hours didn’t feel appropriate here, not after everything that they’d been through over the last few weeks. With a sigh, he let his shoulders slump and his walls lower, and told the truth.

“I had a dream that we didn’t get to you in time. So, yeah, I had to check on you,  _ in the dead of night on a Tuesday. _ And I find you here, making sure that you never get any alone time ever again, because seriously kid, I thought you’d been abducted again!”

That guilt from before flared back, and Varian dropped his eyes to the open books before him. Over the last week, he had been feeling suffocated under the over-protectiveness of his father and the mothering from Rapunzel, but Eugene had consistently been an advocate for Team “Give Varian Space”. The idea that Varian might lose that ally now filled him with regret. 

He blinked blearily and wedged a scrap of parchment into the book before him to mark his place, closing it with his good hand. “Okay,” he sighed. “I’m sorry. It’s just… I… I know that you guys were all worried, and I’ll… I’ll never be able to properly thank you for rescuing me.”

He glanced up through his bangs to find Eugene watching him carefully. When the man didn’t say anything, Varian steeled himself, and continued. 

“But I’ve never felt so helpless before in my life,” he admitted quietly, his words lingering like a ghost between them. “I felt like a scrap of meat that a bunch of dogs were fighting over. I couldn’t defend myself, I couldn’t fight back, I couldn’t… I couldn’t convince Cass to…”

He trailed off, eyes downcast. The weight of his unfinished thought lay heavily on him, nearly pulling him back into those woods, standing beneath that old statue and arguing with her so fiercely, so desperately. Thinking that if he could just line up the right words in the right order, that she would snap out of it. 

Eugene’s hand settled on his good shoulder, and Varian looked up, startled from the memory. 

“So you’re trying to take back some control,” Eugene ventured. Varian gave a small nod and then inhaled deeply, trying to pull himself out of the memory fully. 

For a moment, the two of them sat in silence. Eugene removed his hand from Varian’s shoulder and pushed off of the table, turning to examine the collection of books properly. He flipped one open and thumbed through it; he turned another around to look at it better. Then he planted both hands on the tabletop and looked again at Varian. Gears turned behind his eyes, trying to decide on something. Varian waited patiently, aware that he was in no position to argue with whatever Eugene settled on.

“Okay… Okay. I get it,” Eugene said. “Hell knows I’ve been in plenty of situations throughout my life where I didn’t feel like I had any control over things. If you’re going to start looking for a solution, I won’t get in your way. But let’s leave the sneaking about to Flynn Rider, alright?”

Varian blinked, a relieved but doubtful smile pulling onto his face. “Yeah, fine. But I’ll never be able to convince my dad that it’s a good idea.” 

“Convince your-- yeah, no, what I’m saying is that we’ll keep doing this late night study group, just between the two of us.”

Varian looked up, confused. “But you said no more sneaking around?”

Eugene wagged a finger at him. “I said leave the sneaking around to Flynn Rider.” He tapped his temple in a ‘you follow my drift?’ gesture. “This time of night work for you?”

Flooded with surprise and excitement, Varian couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah. I think I can probably pencil something in between naps.”

“Good. You tell me what to grab, and I’ll grab it for you. Whatever weird, off-the-wall, savant-y scheme you’ve got brewing up there, you can’t do it alone in the shape you’re in. I’ll help, so long as you promise not to sneak off again while leaving a shitty, vague note. Seriously, kid, it was  _ not _ helpful.”

“Hey, you found me, didn’t you?”

Eugene pointed at him and gave him a sharp look, and Varian laughed again. “Okay, fine, no more shitty vague notes.”

This seemed to satisfy the older man, who stood upright and arched his back in a stretch. “Good. Alright, Goggles, where do we start?”

Varian looked back at the books on the table, reaching forward to scratch behind one of Ruddigar’s ears. “Uh, well. I was reading into old Saporian magics, to try and determine what natural laws it follows. Since magic has a source and a suck, like thermodynamics, you can’t have something from nothing, so there’s a source to every spell. And there’s almost always a means to counteract a spell once it begins. We have to start by figuring out if those rules apply to magic from Zhan Tiri’s age.”

“Great. I don’t know what any of that means, but if you need me to climb a ladder and get you a book, I’m your guy.”

They exchanged an easy smile. In the moonlit library, with books open before him and a plan that he could confidently pursue, Varian felt for the first time in weeks like he was in charge of himself. “Hey, Eugene?”

“Hm?”

It didn’t heal his leg. It didn’t soften his aches or fade his bruises. But more than any physical healing, having his agency back felt like he could breathe clean, crisp air after too long spent in stagnant isolation. 

Varian grinned, and really, truly meant it. “... Thanks.”

-

Exactly two weeks and nine hours later, Varian was still suffering the injustice of a walking crutch. For all his enthusiasm about getting out of the cast sooner rather than later, having to rely on a crutch to get around was drawing time out like warm taffy. Two weeks had felt like two months, regardless of how many distractions Rapunzel tried to offer him.

Presently, his current adversary was the stairs down to the palace garden. They mocked him with their sheer number of steps and their complete lack of handrails. They forced him to choose between accepting help or risking humiliation and pain if he fell.

Well, he was already in pain, and had grown quite used to it over the past few weeks. And as for humiliation--it was a worthy risk if it meant he could get something done by himself. Such had become his one and only motivator in the face of others trying to do everything for him. Spite, it seemed, was still very much a part of who he was.

“No, no, I’ve got this,” Varian reassured Rapunzel for the third time, waving off her silent offer of assistance. 

“He’s fine, Blondie,” Eugene groaned from behind them. He stepped outside, hefting the giant box full of Varian’s latest passtime in his arms. It was clearly a strain, but he had insisted that he could handle it without help. 

“Are  _ you _ fine,” Rapunzel asked skeptically, watching Eugene struggle passed her down the steps. 

“Oh, yeah,  _ peachy. _ Kid, I swear to you once your leg is healed, you can lug your shit around on your own.”

“Sure,” Varian replied with a good-natured roll of his eyes, “just as soon as I figure out stairs again.”

In the corner of his eye, he could see Rapunzel move to offer her help again. Before she could, Max stepped in between them, huffing and shaking his head at her once. She laughed awkwardly, muttering a quiet “Right, yeah,” to herself, before following the horse down the steps into the sunshine.

Bracing himself, Varian began to make his way down the stairs. It was slow cautious work, but once he found a rhythm, it became less daunting with each step. Ahead of him in the grass, Eugene has set down the box and was unpacking it while Lance leaned in to examine the jars closely, too curious for his own good.

“So, what is this big reveal, anyway,” Rapunzel asked, waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. Varian took a few more steps to make sure he wasn’t going to fall, before lifting his eyes to her’s.

“Before everything went down, I was working on a preservative to help make perishable food last longer. And since I’ve had nothing but time over the last few weeks, I think I’ve perfected it--Lance, put that down.”

Varian leveled a warning look at the man, who flashed him a toothy grin before setting the jar back into the box sheepishly. The young alchemist took a breath to compose himself, and the last few steps passed under him. All at once, he was standing on the white gravel path of the garden, having defeated the staircase. With boosted confidence, he made his way over to where the others had gathered and lowered himself onto the grass.

“Right now, it makes juice last a lot longer,” he summarized, fully aware that half of his audience wouldn't pay attention to a more in-depth explanation. “The preservative is non-toxic and doesn’t impact the flavor at all. The hope is that I’ll be able to develop it further and preserve lots of things.”

“Varian, that’s amazing,” Rapunzel insisted, her eyes shining as she imagined the possibilities for herself. “This could make food stores during the winter so much more reliable!”

“Seriously,” Eugene muttered, scratching at his beard. “This is what you were in the middle of when this all started?” He leaned over to examine one of the jars closely, as if he might discover some additional secret that made it less mundane. “I was imagining something a little more… explode-y.”

“Not  _ everything _ I make blows up,” Varian defended, grinning slyly at Eugene’s playful jab. Across from him, Lance was clearly struggling to keep his hands to himself. Sighing, Varian cracked the seal on one of the jars and handed it to him. The man took it gratefully and sniffed at the contents before taking a careful sip and humming in delight.

“Well I’m glad you’re able to test it out now, at least,” Rapunzel offered. 

While the others were distracted, Varian reached into his bag and pulled out another jar. Unlike the others, which all had the rich pink of strawberry juice, this one shone gold in the sunlight. He turned and held it out toward Max, who had been keeping a cautious eye on Lance and his inability to keep his hands to himself.

“This one’s for you,” Varian offered. “It’s applesauce. I know you prefer the real thing, but I haven’t figured out how to preserve the whole fruit yet, so…”

The horse whinnied and stepped forward happily, nudging the jar with his nose. Varian cracked the lid and tilted it for Max to get a taste. With a happy neigh to indicate its acceptable taste, Varian’s smile took on a more sincere, sorrowful quality.

“Thank you for all your help, Max,” he said quietly, while Lance and Eugene fought over a jar in the background. The horse stiffened, his ears flicking backwards and his eyes moving away. Guilt, it seemed, was still riding him after the Saporians had escaped with Varian in that alleyway.

“If you hadn’t been there, no one would’ve found out I’d been taken, or who had done it. Really, Max.” Varian ducked to the side to catch the horse’s eye. “Thank you.”

Reluctantly, Max turned to look at him. After an uncertain pause, he seemed to accept the sincerity of Varian’s words, and he lifted his head, his mood visibly lifting.

“Aw, that’s so sweet,” Rapunzel cut in, unable to help herself. “You guys are so cute!”

She pulled Varian into a side hug and gave him a careful squeeze, prompting him to laugh. While Eugene and Lance played keep-away with the jar of strawberry juice they were fighting over, Rapunzel stayed by Varian’s side, one arm around his shoulders. Whether it was to keep him close, or offer comfort, Varian couldn’t be sure. 

All he knew was that here, with these people, he felt more confident than ever that he was on the right path. Even with Cassandra still lost, and an ancient demon out there plotting their demise, Varian was certain that they would pull through.

“Lance,” he suddenly shouted, startled from his warm thoughts, “don’t throw that vial! How the hell did you survive to adulthood?! Eugene, stop him!”

In the warm sunlight of the garden, Varian shook his crutch in warning while Rapunzel looked on laughing. Just maybe, Varian thought, this was what family was supposed to feel like.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone so SO much for all the support and comments throughout this fic! It's been a very long time since I've participated in an active fandom, and it's been phenomenal to see so much enthusiasm and engagement from everyone. I truly cannot express how much I've enjoyed writing this story for you guys.
> 
> There is a sequel in the works! Especially with the whole "everyone is stuck at home" thing going on right now, because of, you know, the plague. I have plenty of time to put into it. 
> 
> There is some set up for the next part in this chapter. Where this story was largely an exploration of Varian and Cassandra, the next part very much revolves around Varian and Eugene, and will take place after Plus Est En Vous. (Don't worry--we haven't seen the last of Cass.)
> 
> It will also see the return of the Saporians, and to absolutely no one's surprise, there will be plenty of hurt/comfort. Sorry, Varian. (But not sorry enough to let you get by unscathed.)
> 
> See you in the next fic! Go wash your hands.


End file.
